Abstract
In this paper, we have studied the total ionizing dose (TID) radiation response up to 2 Mrad(Si) of silicon-oxide-nitride-oxide-silicon (SONOS) memory cells and memory circuits, fabricated in a 130 nm complimentary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) SONOS technology. We explored the threshold voltage (V T ) degradation mechanism and found that the V T shifts of SONOS cells depend on the charge state; simply programming the cell to a higher V T cannot compensate for the radiation induced V T loss. The off-state current (I off) increase in the SONOS cell is also studied in this paper. Both V T and I off degradation would affect the memory system. Read data failures are mainly caused by V T shifts under irradiation, and program and erase failures are mainly caused by increased I off, which overloads the charge pumping circuit. By varying the reference current, our 4 Mb NOR flash chip has the potential to survive a radiation dose of 1 Mrad(Si) in read mode.
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Qiao, F., Pan, L., Yu, X. et al. Total ionizing radiation effects of 2-T SONOS for 130 nm/4 Mb NOR flash memory technology. Sci. China Inf. Sci. 57, 1–9 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11432-013-4982-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11432-013-4982-7