Performance and retention characteristics of nanocrystalline Si floating gate memory with an Al2O3 tunnel layer fabricated by plasma-enhanced atomic layer deposition

Abstract

The down-scaling of nanocrystal Si (nc-Si) floating gate memory must overcome the challenge of leakage current induced by the conventional ultra-thin tunnel layer. We demonstrate that an improved memory performance based on the Al/SiNx/nc-Si/Al2O3/Si structure can be achieved by adopting the Al2O3 tunnel layer fabricated by plasma-enhanced atomic layer deposition. A larger memory window of 7.9 V and better retention characteristics of 4.7 V after 105 s can be obtained compared with the devices containing a conventional SiO2 tunnel layer of equivalent thickness. The capacitance-voltage characteristic reveals that the Al2O3 tunnel layer has a smaller electron barrier height, which ensures that more electrons are injected into the nc-Si dots through the Al2O3/Si interface. The analysis of the conductance-voltage and high-resolution cross-section transmission microscopy reveals that the smaller nc-Si dots dominate in the charge injection in the nc-Si floating gate MOS device with an Al2O3 tunnel layer. With an increase of the nc-Si size, both nc-Si and the interface contribute to the charge storage capacity and retention. The introduction of the Al2O3 tunnel layer in nc-Si floating gate memory provides a method to achieve an improved performance of nc-Si floating gate memory.