Effect of electric field polarity on inter-poly dielectric during cell operation for the retention characteristics

Abstract

Retention characteristic represents a capability to maintain the storage data and it is related with the reliability of memory device. The retention characteristic is degraded by the leakage of charges from a floating gate to a control gate, and thus the leakage current at low and moderate electric field of inter-poly dielectric (IPD) is one of the important characteristic for floating gate type flash memories. In addition, it is necessary to investigate the effects of the electric field polarity on the electric characteristics of IPD because the electric field polarity is changed as the cell operations such as the programming and erasing. Therefore, in this paper, the variation of the leakage current of IPD at moderate electric field region is measured with varying the previously applied electric field polarity. Based on the result, the effect of sequential change of an applied electric field polarity on the electrical characteristics is analyzed.