Threshold voltage variability of NROM memories after exposure to ionizing radiation

Domenico Corso*, Sebania Libertino, Michael Lisiansky, Yakov Roizin, Felix Palumbo, Fabio Principato, Calogero Pace, Paolo Finocchiaro, Salvatore A. Lombardo

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

3 Scopus citations

Abstract

Threshold voltage (Vth) behavior of nitride read-only memories (NROMs) was studied after irradiation with photons (γ- and X-rays), light and heavy ions. Both programmed and nonprogrammed single cells were investigated. The data suggest that two main physical phenomena are contributing to Vth variation and that the Vth loss and the variability can be modeled by a Weibull statistics with a shape parameter k∼2.2 regardless of the irradiation species and total dose. The same peculiarities were found in large memory arrays, confirming the results from single-cell studies but with significantly larger statistics. Hence, once the irradiation dose is known, the Vth loss distribution can be obtained, thus providing a predictive model of the radiation tolerance of NROM memory arrays.

Original languageEnglish
Article number6287009
Pages (from-to)2597-2602
Number of pages6
JournalIEEE Transactions on Electron Devices
Volume59
Issue number10
DOIs
StatePublished - 2012
Externally publishedYes

Funding

FundersFunder number
Ministero degli Affari Esteri

    Keywords

    • Flash memories
    • nitride read-only memories (NROMs)
    • oxide-nitride-oxide (ONO)
    • radiation hardness

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