Self-assembled metallic nanocrystal structures for advanced non-volatile memory applications

Nanocrystal (NC) based non-volatile memories are a leading candidate to replace conventional floating gate memory. Substituting the poly-silicon gate with a layer of discrete nanocrystals or nanodots provides increased immunity to charge loss. Metallic nanocrystals have been found to be advantageous over Si- or Ge-based approaches due to good controllability of the size distribution and the achievable NC densities as well as increased charge storage capacity of metallic nanocrystals. Sufficiently high NC densities have been achieved to demonstrate feasibility for sub-32 nm node non-volatile memory devices.