Improving radiation hardness of EEPROM/flash cell by N2Oannealing

The effects of an N₂O anneal on the radiation effects of a split-gate electrical erasable programmable read only memory (EEPROM)/flash cell with a recently-proposed horn-shaped floating gate were studied. We have found that although the cells appear to survive 1 Mrad(Si) Co⁶⁰ irradiation without data retention failure, the write/erase cycling endurance was severely impeded after irradiation. Specifically, the write/erase cycling endurance was degraded to 20 K from the pre-irradiation value of 50 K. However, by adding an N₂ O annealing step after the interpoly oxidation, the after-irradiation write/erase cycling endurance of the resultant cell can be significantly improved to over 45 K. N₂O annealing also improves the after-irradiation program and erase efficiencies. The N₂O annealing step therefore presents a potential method for enhancing the robustness of the horn-shaped floating-gate EEPROM/flash cells for radiation-hard applications