• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Electrical and Electronic Material Engineers Conference
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• 2009.06a
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• pp.415-416
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• 2009

The tunnel barrier engineered charge trap flash (TBE-CTF) non-volatile memory using CRESTED tunneling barrier was fabricated by stacking thin $Si_3N_4$ and $SiO_2$ dielectric layers. Moreover, high-k based $HfO_2$ charge trap layer and $Al_2O_3$ blocking layer were used for further improvement of the NVM (non-volatile memory) performances. The programming/erasing speed, endurance and data retention of TBE-CTF memory was evaluated.

• Korean Journal of Materials Research
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• v.19 no.9
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• pp.462-467
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• 2009

The Charge Trap Flash (CTF) memory device is a replacement candidate for the NAND Flash device. In this study, Pt/$Al_2O_3/La_2O_3/SiO_2$/Si multilayer structures with lanthanum oxide charge trap layers were fabricated for nonvolatile memory device applications. Aluminum oxide films were used as blocking oxides for low power consumption in program/erase operations and reduced charge transports through blocking oxide layers. The thicknesses of $SiO_2$ were from 30 $\AA$ to 50 $\AA$. From the C-V measurement, the largest memory window of 1.3V was obtained in the 40 $\AA$ tunnel oxide specimen, and the 50 $\AA$ tunnel oxide specimen showed the smallest memory window. In the cycling test for reliability, the 30 $\AA$ tunnel oxide sample showed an abrupt memory window reduction due to a high electric field of 9$\sim$10MV/cm through the tunnel oxide while the other samples showed less than a 10% loss of memory window for $10^4$ cycles of program/erase operation. The I-V measurement data of the capacitor structures indicated leakage current values in the order of $10^{-4}A/cm^2$ at 1V. These values are small enough to be used in nonvolatile memory devices, and the sample with tunnel oxide formed at $850^{\circ}C$ showed superior memory characteristics compared to the sample with $750^{\circ}C$ tunnel oxide due to higher concentration of trap sites at the interface region originating from the rough interface.

• Journal of the Korean Ceramic Society
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• v.38 no.9
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• pp.782-786
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• 2001

Cobalt silicide has been employed to Embedded DRAM (Dynamic Random Access Memory) and Logic (EDL) as contact material to improve its speed. We have investigated the influences of Ti and TiN capping layers on cobalt-silicided Complementary Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor (CMOS) device characteristics. TiN capping layer is shown to be superior to Ti capping layer with respect to high thermal stability and the current driving capability of pMOSFETs. Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometry (SIMS) showed that the Ti capping layer could not prevent the out-diffusion of boron dopants. The resulting operating current of MOS devices with Ti capping layer was degraded by more than 10%, compared with those with TiN.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Electrical and Electronic Material Engineers Conference
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• 2009.11a
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• pp.53-53
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• 2009

Charge trap flash memory devices with modified tunneling barriers were fabricated using the tunneling barrier engineering technique. Variable oxide thickness (VARIOT) barrier and CRESTED barrier consisting of thin $SiO_2$ and $Si_3N_4$ dielectric layers were used as engineered tunneling barriers. The VARIOT type tunneling barrier composed of oxide-nitride-oxide (ONO) layers revealed reliable electrical characteristics; long retention time and superior endurance. On the other hand, the CRESTED tunneling barrier composed of nitride-oxide-nitride (NON) layers showed degraded retention and endurance characteristics. It is found that the degradation of NON barrier is associated with the increase of interface state density at tunneling barrier/silicon channel by programming and erasing (P/E) stress.

• Journal of Magnetics
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• v.16 no.4
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• pp.328-331
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• 2011

Here, we describe a dual spin valve structure with distinct switching fields for two pinned layers. A device with this structure has a staircase of three distinct magnetoresistive states. The multiple resistance states are achieved by controlling the exchange coupling between two ferromagnetic pinned layers and two adjacent anti-ferromagnetic pinning layers. The maximum magnetoresistance ratio is 7.9% for the current-perpendicular-to-plane and 7.2% for the current-in-plane geometries, with intermediate magnetoresistance ratios of 3.9% and 3.3%, respectively. The requirements for using this exchange-biased stack as a three-state memory device are also discussed.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Electrical and Electronic Material Engineers Conference
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• 2002.11a
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• pp.186-189
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• 2002

The MFIS capacitors were fabricated using a metalorganic decomposition method. Thin layers of $CeO_2$ were deposited as a buffer layer on Si substrate and BLT thin films were used as a ferroelectric layer. The electrical and structural properties of the MFIS structure were investigated. X-ray diffraction was used to determine the phase of the BLT thin films and the quality of the $CeO_2$ layer. The morphology of films and the interface structures of the BLT and the $CeO_2$ layers were investigated by scanning electron microscopy. The width of the memory window in the C-V curves for the MFIS structure is 4.78 V. The experimental results show that the BLT-based MFIS structure is suitable for non-volatile memory FETs with large memory window.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Electrical and Electronic Material Engineers
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• v.22 no.1
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• pp.17-21
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• 2009

The electrical characteristics of band-gap engineered tunneling barriers consisting of thin $SiO_2$ and $Si_3N_4$ dielectric layers were investigated for nonvolatile memory device applications. The band structure of band-gap engineered tunneling barriers was studied and the effectiveness of these tunneling barriers was compared with the conventional tunneling $SiO_2$ barrier. The band-gap engineered tunneling barriers composed of thin $SiO_2$ and $Si_3N_4$ layers showed a lower operation voltage, faster speed and longer retention time than the conventional $SiO_2$ tunnel barrier. The thickness of each $SiO_2$ and $Si_3N_4$ layer was optimized to improve the performance of non-volatile memory.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Electrical and Electronic Material Engineers Conference
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• 2008.11a
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• pp.19-19
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• 2008

We investigated the programmable memory characteristics of nanoparticle-based memory devices based on the elementary metal nanoparticles (Co and Au) and their binary mixture synthesized by a micellar route to ordered arrays of metal nanoparticles as charge trapping layers. According to the metal nanoparticle species quite different programming/erasing efficiencies were observed, resulting in the tunable memory characteristics at the same programming/erasing bias conditions. This finding will be a good implication for further device scaling and novel device applications since most processes are based on the conventional semiconductor processes.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.34 no.3
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• pp.388-398
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• 2012

Three-dimensional (3D) memories using through-silicon vias (TSVs) will likely be the first commercial applications of 3D integrated circuit technology. A 3D memory yield can be enhanced by vertical redundancy sharing strategies. The methods used to select memory dies to form 3D memories have a great effect on the 3D memory yield. Since previous die-selection methods share redundancies only between neighboring memory dies, the opportunity to achieve significant yield enhancement is limited. In this paper, a novel die-selection method is proposed for multilayer 3D memories that shares redundancies among all of the memory dies by using additional TSVs. The proposed method uses three selection conditions to form a good multi-layer 3D memory. Furthermore, the proposed method considers memory fault characteristics, newly detected faults after bonding, and multiple memory blocks in each memory die. Simulation results show that the proposed method can significantly improve the multilayer 3D memory yield in a variety of situations. The TSV overhead for the proposed method is almost the same as that for the previous methods.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.33 no.6
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• pp.904-913
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• 2011

Three-dimensional (3D) memories using through-silicon vias (TSVs) as vertical buses across memory layers will likely be the first commercial application of 3D integrated circuit technology. The memory dies to stack together in a 3D memory are selected by a die-selection method. The conventional die-selection methods do not result in a high-enough yields of 3D memories because 3D memories are typically composed of known-good-dies (KGDs), which are repaired using self-contained redundancies. In 3D memory, redundancy sharing between neighboring vertical memory dies using TSVs is an effective strategy for yield enhancement. With the redundancy sharing strategy, a known-bad-die (KBD) possibly becomes a KGD after bonding. In this paper, we propose a novel die-selection method using KBDs as well as KGDs for yield enhancement in 3D memory. The proposed die-selection method uses three search-space conditions, which can reduce the search space for selecting memory dies to manufacture 3D memories. Simulation results show that the proposed die-selection method can significantly improve the yield of 3D memories in various fault distributions.