An Analytical Programming Model for the Drain-Coupling Source-Side Injection Split Gate Flash EEPROM

Abstract

This paper presents a compact and accurate analytical model for evaluating the programming behaviors of the drain-coupling source-side injection (SSI) split-gate Flash memory. Starting with the bias-dependent and time-varying drain coupling ratio, a programming model is developed on the basis of the constant barrier height approximation and Lucky-electron model to express the full transient injection current, peak lateral electric field, and storage charge as functions of technological, physical, and electrical parameters. The extracted re-direction mean-free path of the SSI device is smaller than that of the channel hot-electron counterpart by one order of magnitude, which provides the physical intuition for the derived high injection efficiency of around 2/1000. The intrinsic coupling ratio depends only on technological parameters and is presented as the design index of the device. The usefulness of this model is its ability of constructing the complete operation plot of the time-to-program versus the programming voltage for various reliability windows and tunable technological parameters. Besides, the variance of the read current distribution of a memory array is also analytically predicted.