Performance and Reliability of 4 Mb eFLASH Memory Array Featuring 28 nm Split-Gate Cell with HKMG Select Transistor
S. Jourba, N. Bollon, C. Decobert, Gilles Festes, B. Bertello, Feichi Zhou, Viktor Markov, Yuri Tkachev, J. Kim, P. Ghazav, X. Liu, N. Do, R. Richter, Stefan Dünkel, Martin Trentzsch, Alban Zaka, T. Herrmann, Thomas Melde, B. Muller, Frank Mauersberger · 2020
This paper presents the characterization and reliability results achieved on 1.8 V 4 Mb flash array built around 3rd generation Embedded SuperFlash® (ESF3) memory cell featuring high-k metal gate (HKMG) select transistor and embedded into Low-Power 28 nm CMOS HKMG technology with gate-first architecture. Endurance shows better performance in terms of erase degradation as compared to prior technology nodes with poly-SiON select transistor. This improvement is attributed to HKMG-related process integration scheme allowing to reduce the effect of the CMOS baseline on tunnel oxide quality. Excellent program-erase performance, program disturb windows and data retention capability are observed.