Methods of erasing a memory device and a method of programming a memory device for low-voltage and low-power applications

摘要

A method of erasing and a method of programming a nonvolatile memory cell in a chip is disclosed. Said cell comprises a semiconductor substrate including a source and a drain region and a channel therebetween, a floating gate extending over a portion of said channel, a control gate extending over another portion of the channel region, and a program gate capacitively coupled through a dielectric layer to said floating gate. The methods or schemes are using substantially the lowest possible voltage to erase a nonvolatile memory cell of the floating-gate type without having the SILC problem. Therefore, these schemes are expected to allow a further scaling of the minimum feature size of Flash memory products which is necessary for cost reduction and density increase.;The present invention also aims to further decrease the voltages necessary to erase/program the memory device without degrading the corresponding performance.