Stretched tunnelling body contact structure for suppressing the FBE in a vertical cell DRAM

Abstract

Vertical cell transistor is necessary to drastically reduce the chip size of the dynamic random access memory. This structure has a great advantage in terms of shrinkage, but it also has the disadvantage of increasing the OFF-state current by causing floating body effect (FBE). For the first time, it is demonstrated that a stretched tunnelling diode, which consists of a p + layer next to the n + active layer in the buried body, leads to a drastically suppressed FBE. The OFF-state current is sharply reduced by about seven orders compared with a conventional structure. Furthermore, the decrease in the OFF-state current is at minimum when the length of the stretched p + region is approximately half the channel length ( L p / L =1/2).