SILICON NANOCRYSTAL MEMORY - CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES

摘要

A silicon nanocrystal memory has been developed to demonstrate its feasibility as a strong contender to the rapidly growing flash memory market. A mono-layer of silicon nanocrystals deposited with an areal density of 10~(12)dots/cm~2 has been incorporated into a leading-edge CMOS process to produce better than 2V program/erase window, sufficient for most non-volatile memory applications. This paper reports on the advantages of the technology, the challenges of the silicon nanocrystal deposition and the opportunities where the nanotech community can have in advancing the art in nanocrystal memories.