Ge/Si hetero-nanocrystal nonvolatile floating gate memory

Silicon nanocrystal (NC) has been used as the charge storage in nonvolatile memory devices owing to their advantages of low operation voltage, small size and compatibility to the logic circuit. In order to improve the retention characteristics and the programming speed simultaneously, Ge/Si hetero-nanocrystal (HNC) was proposed to be used as the floating gate. In this presentation, we report the fabrication and characterization of Ge/Si HNC MOS memories.