High-speed and low-voltage performance in a charge-trapping flash memory using a NiO tunnel junction

Abstract

A novel charge-trapping nonvolatile memory using gate injection switching is demonstrated in this paper. This device is composed of metal/NiO/nitride/oxide/silicon in order to make use of the electrical transport phenomenon found in NiO tunnel junctions. Compared with the reference structure of a conventional metal/oxide/nitride/oxide/silicon memory, the proposed device showed a larger memory window, very fast switching speeds of 100 ns/1 mu s and a low operation voltage of +/- 5V for the program/erase states. In addition, we observed that a large number of interface states in the bottom oxide were reduced using deep-level transient spectroscopy.