Vertical band-to-band tunneling based non-volatile memory with high-K gate stack and stable hysteresis characteristics up to 400K

This work reports for the first time the demonstration of non-volatile memory (NVM) cells using a Tunnel FETs (TFET) with high-k Al
₂
O
₃
/HfO
₂
/Al
₂
O
₃
dielectric stack and vertical tunneling. Vertical tunneling TFET devices are fabricated and characterized to evaluate their potential as low power memory operation. The memory cell can be programmed with voltages from -10V to -15V (p type) and show extremely stable memory hysteresis up to 10
⁶
program cycles with very low leakage. For the first time we experimentally show that, in strong contrast with FET-based NVM, the TFET memory window (VT shift) is highly stable with temperature up to 400K due to the specific band-to-band (BTB) conduction of TFETs.