Effect of reactive ion etching chemistry on plasma damage in EPROM cells

There has been much work on studying the effects of plasma damage on microelectronic circuits. Most of this work has focused on gate oxide damage as a result of plasma charging. This paper explores damage to nonvolatile memory cells, specifically erasable programmable read only memories (EPROMs). This damage is unique in that it only affects EPROM cells and their ability to store charge. Several causes of damage discussed here include plasma chemistry, which was found to be the key to solving the problem.