A new soft error mechanism of dynamic memory with grounded cell plate

This paper reports a new soft error mechanism of dynamic random access memory (DRAM) with grounded cell plate. We find that the existence of p-type inversion layer at the oxide-substrate. interface in the DRAM cell capacitor causes drastic increase of the soft error rate (SER), We. propose a quantitative model to analyze the mechanism of the new soft error mode. The effectiveness of the model is demonstrated using an n-channel 256k DRAM with the grounded cell plate. The optimization scheme of the cell capacitor for the future DRAM´s is also described based on the model. The soft error mode leads to much severer lower bound of the n^-concentration of the cell capacitor than that given in the previous works.