Single-electron phenomena in ultra-scaled floating-gate devices and their impact on electrical characteristics

In this paper, single-electron effects are firstly evidenced on nanoscale floating-gate memory devices and their impact on some electrical characteristics is studied. During this work, these phenomena have been put in evidence as well as on transfer characteristics than on ID-time measurements for a wide range of device area. After showing that the amplitude of discrete threshold voltage shifts due to single-electron transfer (δVTH) is inversely proportional to the device area, the impact of these phenomena on retention characteristics has been quantified and discussed for ultra-scaled memory devices, with dimensions reduced to 40 × 30 nm2. It is shown that the intrinsic reliability of these devices is affected by the stochastic nature of single-electron transfer.