Investigation of stiction effects in nano-electro-mechanical (NEM) memory cells based on finite element analysis (FEA)

As NEM memory cells are scaled down for low operating voltage, high operating speed and high density, the stiction effects between a movable beam and charge-trapped layer become more significant. As stiction effects become stronger, release voltage becomes smaller which is problematic in terms of reliability. However, strong stiction effects also enable nonvolatile memory operation without the charge trapped layer which suffers scalability of NEM memory cells. In this paper, the effects of stiction on NEM memory cell performance will be investigated by using finite element analysis (FEA) simulation.