Charge Trapping Flash Memory With High-k Dielectrics

High capacity and affordable price of flash memory make portable electronic devices popular, which in turn stimulates the further scaling down effort of the flash memory cells. Indeed the flash memory cells have been scaling down aggressively and face several crucial challenges. As a result, the technology trend is shifting from the floating-gate cell to the charge-trap cell in order to overcome fatal interference problems between cells. There are critical problems in the charge-trap memory cell which will become main-stream in the near future. The first potential problem is related to the memory retention which is degraded by the charge leakage through thin tunnel dielectrics. The second is the reduction of charge-storage capacity in the scaled down SiN trapping layer. The third is the low operation-efficiency resulting from the methods used to solve the first two problems. Using high-k tunnel dielectrics can solve the first problem. The second problem can be overcome by adopting a high-k trapping dielectric. The dielectric constant of the blocking layer must be higher than those of the tunnel dielectric and the trapping dielectric in order to maintain operation efficiency. This dissertation study is focused on adopting high-k dielectrics in all three of the aforementioned layers for figure generations of flash memory technology.;For the high-k tunnel dielectric, the MAD Si3N4 and the MAD Al2O3 are used to fabricate the MANNS structure and the MANAS structure. The MANNS structure has the advantage of reducing the erase voltage due to its low barrier height for holes. In addition, the retention characteristic of the MANAS structure is not sensitive to temperature. The reason is that the carrier transport in MAD Al2O3 is dominated by F-N tunneling, which is nearly independent of temperature. Adopting TiOx as the trapping dielectric forms the MATAS structure. Although the charge capacity of TiOx is not very high, the operating voltage can be reduced to less than 10V, due to TiOx's very high dielectric constant. The use of ferroelectric PZT film in the charge trap flash cell was then explored. The PZT-Al2O3-Si stack shows huge memory windows, reliable endurance, and good retention characteristics although its operation voltage is high. According to the trapped charge centroid extracted from the photo I-V data, the operating mechanism of PZT-based flash cell is established.