Stress-induced leakage current of tunnel oxide derived from flashmemory read-disturb characteristics

This paper describes the characteristics of the stress-induced leakage current of tunnel oxide derived from flash memory read-disturb characteristics. The following three items were newly observed. First, the threshold voltage shift (ΔV_th) of the memory cell under the gate bias condition (read disturb condition) consists of two regions, a decay region and a steady-state region. The decay region is due to both the initial trapping or detrapping of the carriers in the tunnel oxide and the decay of the stress-induced leakage current of the tunnel oxide. The steady-state region is determined by the saturation of the stress-induced leakage current of the tunnel oxide. Second, the read disturb life time is mainly determined by the steady-state region for the oxide thickness of 5.7-10.6 nm investigated here. Third, a high-temperature (125°C) write/erase operation degrades the steady-state region characteristics in comparison with room temperature (30°C) operation. Therefore, accelerated write/erase tests can be carried out at higher operation temperatures     

A compact on-chip ECC for low cost flash memories

A compact on-chip error correcting circuit (ECC) for low cost flash memories has been developed. The total increase in chip area is 2%, including all cells, sense amplifiers, logic, and wiring associated with the ECC. The proposed on-chip ECC, employing 10 check bits for 512 data bits, has been implemented on an experimental 64M-bit NAND flash memory. The cumulative sector error rate has been improved from 10^-4 to 10^-10. By transferring read data from the sense amplifiers to the ECC twice, 522-Byte temporary buffers, which are required for the conventional ECC and occupy a large part of the ECC area, have been eliminated. As a result, the area for the circuit has been drastically reduced by a factor of 25. The proposed on-chip ECC has been optimized in consideration of balance between the reliability improvement and the cell area overhead. The power increase has been suppressed to less than 1 mA