The demonstration of low-cost and logic process fully-compatible OTP memory on advanced HKMG CMOS with a newly found dielectric fuse breakdown

For the first time, the dielectric fuse breakdown has been observed in HKMG and poly-Si CMOS devices. It was found that, different from the conventional anti-fuse dielectric breakdown, such as the hard and soft breakdowns, this new fuse-breakdown behavior exhibits a typical property of an open gate and can be operated in much lower programming current (<; 50μA), fast speed (~20μsec), and excellent data retention, in comparison to the other fuse mechanisms. Based on this new mechanism, we have designed a smallest memory cell array which can be easily integrated into state-of-the-art advanced CMOS technology to realize highly reliable, secure, and dense OTP functionality with very low cost to meet the requirements of memory applications in the IoT era.