Performance and Reliability of Multilayer Silicon Nanocrystal Nonvolatile Memory

Nonvolatile memories (NVMs) with triple layers of silicon nanocrystals were fabricated with conventional CMOS technology.This paper explores the program/erase performance and reliability of NVMs with three layers of nanocrystals.The results indicate that the nanocrystals in the triple-layer nanocrystal NVM (NCNVM) are difficult to fully charge during the programming process.The programming speed of the triple-layer NCNVMs is quicker than that of single-layer NCNVMs,which means that the second and third layers of nanocrystals in the triple-layer NCNVM affect the charge of the first layer nanocrystals.Reliability tests show that the memory window has little degradation after 1×104 cycles.