Programming Transients of Trapping Nitride Storage Flash Memory Cells and Evidence of Lateral Charge Redistributions during or after Programming

Nitride based, localized charge trapping storage flash memory devices with a SONOS stack get increasingly interest due to some advantages compared to conventional floating gate memory devices (Eitan et al., 2000). One of these is the ability to store multi bits in one single cell. There are several previous attempts to simulate and to measure the lateral extend of the localized charges. For the first time, the overall transient programming characteristics is compared with simulations which combine the Monte Carlo (MC) method for the modeling of charge carrier injection and the hydrodynamic (HD) transport model. Distinct features are verified under the assumption of a lateral redistribution of the trapped charges. This model has been proven at all our TwinFlash technologies