Effect of MIM and n-Well Capacitors on Programming Characteristics of EEPROM

An electrically erasable programmable read-only memory (EEPROM) containing a stacked metal-insulator-metal (MIM) and n-well capacitor is proposed. It was fabricated using a 0.18 $\mu$m standard complementary metal-oxide semiconductor process. The depletion capacitance of the n-well region was effectively applied without sacrificing the cell-area and control gate coupling ratio. The device performed very similarly to the MIM capacitor cell regardless of the smaller cell area. This is attributed to the high control gate coupling ratio and capacitance. The erase speed of the proposed EEPROM was faster than that of the cell containing the MIM control gate.