A Novel Micro Wall Heater for Thermally-Assisted 3D AND-type Flash Memory to Radically Boost the Write/Erase Speed and Endurance for the Applications of Write-Intensive Persistent Memory

We demonstrate a novel micro wall heater implemented in a 3D AND-type Flash memory to radically enhance the speed and endurance. The micro wall heater is a low-resistance tungsten metal plate that is built in a slit in the 3D AND structure. The micro wall heater can heat up the entire small sector (~2K cells) above 300C during read/write/erase operations. It provides thermal assisted read (read current gain >50%), thermal-assisted +FN Programming (<1usec write time with delta Vt>5V), and thermal-assisted –FN erasing (<10usec sector erasing time with delta Vt>5V). The micro wall heater provides "self-healing" Flash to recover the cycling-induced damage. 50M endurance is achieved with regular heater annealing per 5K cycling stress, and 10M endurance is achieved by thermal-assisted erase during each cycling. This micro wall heater design for 3D AND-type Flash memory can support the write-intensive persistent memory applications.