Paper Info
Title
Physically-based evaluation of aging contributions in HC/FN-programmed 40 nm NOR Flash technology.
Abstract
In this paper, an in-depth aging assessment for 40nm NOR Flash cells, programmed by Hot Carrier (HC) and erased by Fowler-Nordheim (FN) mechanisms, is performed during Program/Erase (P/E) cycling. Firstly, the difficulty of properly analyzing the overall HC+FN wear out and the importance of evaluating the different cell characteristic drifts are pointed out. Thus, in order to thoroughly explore the cell degradation, ad-hoc experimental setup and test structures are considered. In particular, using customizable gate patterns during P/E operations, the cell endurance is successfully reproduced on equivalent Flash transistors. Taking advantage of these results and of cell dynamics computation within P/E phases, a fine extraction and separation of electrostatic and cell performance decays within the Programming Window (PW) evolution is presented. Then, using this technique, an accurate physical assessment of cell aging characteristic evolutions under different gate ramp patterns is provided. This attitude is shown to give important guidelines for the optimization of Flash cell endurance performance for a certain initial PW. In particular, the erase pattern is demonstrated not to significantly influence the PW drift, whereas, lowering the ramp speed during the program operation, an important increase of Vth in both states is observed and physically explained.
Year
DOI
Venue
2017
10.1016/j.microrel.2017.05.039
Microelectronics Reliability
Keywords
Field
DocType
NOR Flash memory,Reliability,Endurance,Defects,Traps
Electronic engineering,Degradation (geology),Engineering,Transistor,Computation
Journal
Volume
ISSN
Citations 
79
0026-2714
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
4
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Giulio Torrente100.68
Jean Coignus221.78
Alexandre Vernhet300.68
Jean-Luc Ogier433.38
David Roy500.68
Gérard Ghibaudo65134.87