Technologies and reliability of modern embedded flash cells

We have examined the various technologies for implementing embedded flash cells. We discuss the technological basics with regard to practical consequences and concentrate on the aspects of reliability of embedded flash cells. The main focus is automotive application because they pose extremely hard requirements in terms of ambient parameters, life-time and programming cycles. Our work is mainly composed of three different parts. The first part gives an insight into the basic technology of embedded flash memory. It specifically concentrates on floating gate devices, which dominate today’s products. This first part is based on a broad analysis of scientific literature and describes the state of the art. The required process steps are presented as well as the test approaches to ensure a high-quality production level. In the second part an overview is given about products actually on the market. Based on this information, the technological characteristics of the different cell architectures are discussed in the third part.