Reliability of Trench Capacitors for VLSI Memories

Trench capacitors will be used in high density memories, such as the 1Mbit or 4Mbit DRAM, in order to minimize the size of the chip. In this paper the properties and reliability of trench capacitors are discussed. We show that the leakage and break-down characteristics are dominated by the trench profile. Accelerated wearout shows that trench capacitors are suitable for 5V operation, and that alpha particle induced soft error rates are similar to, or better than, conventional planar devices.