Impact of Cycling on Random Telegraph Noise in 3-D NAND Flash Arrays

This letter investigates the cycling dependence of random telegraph noise (RTN) in 3-D NAND Flash arrays. Experimental results reveal that cycling has a very weak impact on RTN in 3-D arrays, confirming even from this standpoint the general improvement in performance and reliability of these arrays with respect to their planar predecessors. In particular, even a large cycling dose of 10k program/erase cycles gives rise just to a slight increase of RTN, which is attributed to the growth of the average number of trap states contributing to the phenomenon. The statistical distribution of the amplitude of the single-trap RTN fluctuations is shown, instead, to be unaffected by cycling and to keep the same temperature sensitivity irrespective of the cycling dose.