High Temperature Oxide (HTO) for non volatile memories applications

Abstract

High Temperature Oxide (HTO) properties are investigated to replace both ONO interpoly dielectric in flash memory cells and thermal gate oxide in peripheral transistors (decoding logic). HTO cells charge loss and writeerase endurance characteristics are close to ONO cells. For peripheral transistors, interface states density can be decreased down to thermal oxide D it by an O 2 anneal, however negative bulk trapping remains larger than for thermal oxide. HTO was then demonstrated to be an interesting solution for lost cost per bit flash cells memories, even if some improvement for peripheral oxide replacement are required.