A New Programming Disturbance Phenomenon in NAND Flash Memory By Source/Drain Hot-Electrons Generated By GIDL Current

A new programming disturbance phenomenon in the NAND flash cell operation is introduced, which we have modeled and named as "source/drain hot-carrier injection disturbance" (abbr. "hot-carrier disturbance"). The source/drain hot electrons are supplied from gate-induced drain leakage current at the GSL (ground-select line) transistor gate edge and are accelerated in the source/drain region of GSL-WLO (word line 0) cell, then are injected to the WLO cell. The simulation results show that the space of GSL-WLO cell should be kept over 110 nm to suppress the hot-carrier disturbance, which is also verified by experiment