A new soft error mechanism of dynamic memory with grounded cell plate

This paper reports a new soft error mechanism of dynamic random access memory (DRAM) with grounded cell plate. We find that the existence of p-type inversion layer at the oxide-substrate. interface in the DRAM cell capacitor causes drastic increase of the soft error rate (SER), We. propose a quantitative model to analyze the mechanism of the new soft error mode. The effectiveness of the model is demonstrated using an n-channel 256k DRAM with the grounded cell plate. The optimization scheme of the cell capacitor for the future DRAM's is also described based on the model. The soft error mode leads to much severer lower bound of the n^-concentration of the cell capacitor than that given in the previous works.