Superior endurance performance of nonvolatile memory devices based on discrete storage in surface-nitrided Si nanocrystals

Abstract

The surface-nitrided silicon nanocrystals (Si-NCs) floating gate nonvolatile memory (NVM) devices were fabricated by 0.13 μm node CMOS technology. The surface-nitrided Si-NCs were formed in-situ by low-pressure chemical vapor deposition and followed by nitridation treatment in NH3 ambient. It is found that the nitridation treatment not only enhances the control effect of gate voltage on channel carriers by passivation of the Si-NCs surface defects but also suppresses releasing of the stored carriers among the neighboring Si-NCs and leakage from Si-NCs to channel through the tunneling oxide by a silicon nitride cover layer acted as potential barrier. Consequently, the storage carriers are fully discrete in the Si-NCs, which are different from that in the conventional poly-crystal Si or SONOS floating gate NVM devices. The surface-nitrided Si-NCs NVM devices show lower subthreshold swing value of 0.13 V/decade, faster P/E speed characteristics of 1 μs at ±7 V, and good retention characteristics at room temperature. Furthermore, due to the improvement of the tunneling oxide quality by nitridation treatment, the stable memory window of 1.7 V has been kept after 107 P/E cycles, showing superior endurance characteristics with the good retention characteristics. Our fabrication of surface-nitrided Si-NCs floating gate NVM is compatible with the standard CMOS technology, which may be employed in the 3-D NAND technology to further improve the device performance.