Imec Advances NAND Flash Technology with Ultra-Thin Hybrid Floating Gate Cell

Imec announces that it has developed an ultra-thin hybrid floating gate cell with demonstrated functionality. The results, which are presented at this week’s 2012 IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM, San Francisco, USA, December 10-12, 2012), are an important step for further scaling of NAND Flash technology towards the 10nm half pitch node and beyond.

TEM of Ultra thin Hybrid Floating Gate (HFG) with high-k Inter Gate Dielectric (IGD) extending Flash scaling beyond 1x node.

The increasing need for high density flash memory has driven the scaling of the technology down to the 19nm half pitch node which is currently in production. However, from such dimensions on, the Control Gate (CG) can no longer be wrapped around the Floating Gate (FG), urging for a planar floating gate architecture. But planarising the technology results in a reduced coupling of the CG and FG. Consequently, the performance degrades due to leakage through the Interpoly dielectric (IPD). In order to recover the performance in planar devices, imec has developed a Hybrid Floating Gate (HFG) architecture featuring a low work function material at the bottom and a high work function material at the top. The functionality has been successfully demonstrated in integrated cells. Moreover, to limit the cell to cell interference occuring in a high-density NAND array, imec scaled down the thickness of the hybrid floating gate to only 4nm.

Jan Van Houdt, Director of the Flash memory program at imec: “Flash memory is the state-of-the-art technology in all mobile devices, ranging from cell phones, digital cameras, USB sticks, MP3 players and tablets, to solid state drives. To address the exploding demand for memory capacity in such devices, imec is pushing the roadmap of the current Flash technology. We are excited to have demonstrated this functional ultra-thin hybrid floating gate cell technology, as an enabling solution for our partners to scale Flash memory down to 10nm and further increase the memory capacity in next-generation mobile devices”.

These results were obtained in cooperation with imec’s key memory partners INTEL, Micron, Samsung, SanDisk, Toshiba and SK Hynix.

Source: http://www2.imec.be/

Citations

Please use one of the following formats to cite this article in your essay, paper or report:

  • APA

    IMEC. (2019, February 09). Imec Advances NAND Flash Technology with Ultra-Thin Hybrid Floating Gate Cell. AZoM. Retrieved on March 30, 2023 from https://www.azom.com/news.aspx?newsID=35085.

  • MLA

    IMEC. "Imec Advances NAND Flash Technology with Ultra-Thin Hybrid Floating Gate Cell". AZoM. 30 March 2023. <https://www.azom.com/news.aspx?newsID=35085>.

  • Chicago

    IMEC. "Imec Advances NAND Flash Technology with Ultra-Thin Hybrid Floating Gate Cell". AZoM. https://www.azom.com/news.aspx?newsID=35085. (accessed March 30, 2023).

  • Harvard

    IMEC. 2019. Imec Advances NAND Flash Technology with Ultra-Thin Hybrid Floating Gate Cell. AZoM, viewed 30 March 2023, https://www.azom.com/news.aspx?newsID=35085.

Tell Us What You Think

Do you have a review, update or anything you would like to add to this news story?

Leave your feedback
Your comment type
Submit