A CMOS SOC Compatible Memory
- Detailed Technology Description
- A new, ulta-compact, CMOS-compatible design for non-volatile memory cells was developed.
- Others
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- Patent: 7,057,234
- *Abstract
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A new, ulta-compact, CMOS-compatible design for non-volatile memory cells. Cornell's design eliminates the need for each memory cell to have its own separate charge trapping region, such as the gate-oxide stack, utilizing instead a broad, even wafer-wide charge-trapping region shared by multiple memory cells. The charge trapping region consists of materials such as silicon nitride and silicon dioxide specially layered between the substrate and the semiconductor layer. Injected electrons are captured in the charge-trapping layer, and prevented from moving laterally by bulk traps or defects in the charge-trapping layer, eliminating the need for physical separation between the charge-trapping regions used by individual memory cells. The new design has the additional advantage that the same structure can operate as both a non-volatile memory cell (at higher voltages) and a transistor (at low voltages), greatly simplifying production of combined memory-logic devices. With low voltages (less than 2V), the device acts like a transistor, while at high voltages (between 5 and 10 V), charge can be injected or removed from the storage layer. It will allow for far smaller non-volatile memories, by using a back-plane to store charge instead of the gate-oxide stack. It is CMOS-compatible, so non-volatile memory can easily be placed in the same circuit as logic. Because it acts as both a transistor and memory, clever devices could even eliminate additional transistors by having a mix of the logic and memory. This is particularly significant because charge continues to be stored during operation as a transistor. Finally, the memory has a rather low programming voltage (5V rather than 12V), and is therefore more compatible with the CMOS programming circuitry. Unique wafer design incorporating the novel charge-trapping region is also patent pending.
- *Licensing
- Patrick Govangpjg26@cornell.edu(607) 254-2330
- Country/Region
- USA
