• Journal of the Korean Institute of Electrical and Electronic Material Engineers
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• v.15 no.10
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• pp.831-837
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• 2002

Scaled SONOS transistors have been fabricated by 0.35$\mu\textrm{m}$ CMOS standard logic process. The thickness of stacked ONO(blocking oxide, memory nitride, tunnel oxide) gate insulators measured by TEM are 2.5 nm, 4.0 nm and 2.4 nm, respectively. The SONOS memories have shown low programming voltages of ${\pm}$8.5 V and long-term retention of 10-year Even after 2 ${\times}$ 10$\^$5/ program/erase cycles, the leakage current of unselected transistor in the erased state was low enough that there was no error in read operation and we could distinguish the programmed state from the erased states precisely The tight distribution of the threshold voltages in the programmed and the erased states could remove complex verifying process caused by over-erase in floating gate flash memory, which is one of the main advantages of the charge-trap type devices. A single power supply operation of 3 V and a high endurance of 1${\times}$10$\^$6/ cycles can be realized by the programming method for a flash-erased type EEPROM.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Telematics and Electronics D
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• v.36D no.11
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• pp.56-62
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• 1999

All the cells on the whole memory array or a block of the memory array in the Flash EEPROM's are erased at the same time using Fowler-Nordheim (FN) tunneling. some of the cels are often overerased since the tunneling is not a self-limited process. In this paper, the optimum doping concentration of the floating gate solve the overerase problem has been studied. For these studies, N-type MOSFETs and MOS capacitors with various doping concentrations of the gate polysilicon have been fabricated and their electrical characteristics have been measured and analyzed. As the results of the experiment, it has been found that the overerase problem can be prevented if the doping concentration of the floating gate is low enough (i.e. below $1.3{\times}10^{18}/cm^3$). It is because the potential difference between the floating gate and the source is lowered due to the formation of the depletion layer in the floating gate and thus the erasing operation stops by itself after most of the electrons stored in the floating gate are extracted. On the other hand, the uniformity of the Vt and the gm has been significantly poor if the coping concentration of the floating, gate is too much lowered (i.e. below $1.3{\times}10^{17}/cm^3$), which is believed to be due to nonuniform loss of the dopants from the nonuniform segregation in the floating gate. Consequently, the optimum doping concentration of the floating gate to suppress the overerase problem and get the uniform Vt and has been found to range from $1.3{\times}10^{17}/cm^3$ to $1.3{\times}10^{18}/cm^3$ in the Flash EEPROM.