A 113mm2 32Gb 3b/cell NAND flash memory

NAND flash memories are used in digital still cameras, cellular phones, MP3 players and various memory cards. As seen in the growing needs for applications such as solid-state drives and video camcoders, the market demands for larger-capacity storage has continuously increased and NAND flash memories are enabling a wide range of new applications. In such situations, to achieve larger capacity at low cost per bit, technical improvement in feature-size scaling, multi-bit per cell and area reduction are essential. To respond to such continuous requirements of cost reduction and density increase, 32 Gb 3 b/cell (D3) NAND flash memory with sub-35 nm CMOS process is developed. Introduction of sub-35 nm CMOS process and D3 technology doubles the capacity at almost the same chip area compared to previously published 43 nm 16 Gb 2 b/cell (D2) chip and about 80% chip area compared to previously published 56 nm 16 Gb D3 chip. The chip of size 9.215 x 12.247 mm² = 112.86 mm² enables the 32 Gb chip to fit in a microSD memory card. The chip architecture has 2 planes with 1.4 K blocks/plane, 1.5 MB block size and 8 KB page size. The block consists of 66 wordlines (WLs) containing 2 dummy WLs between select gates (SGs). All memory cells on the same WL have 3 pages and can be programmed and read simultaneously.