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 × 10
⁴
cycles.