摘要

As the cell size scales down to 90 nm node, the mismatch of spatial charge distribution dramatically aggravates the reliability degradation of localized trapping polysilicon-oxide-nitride-oxide-silicon (SONOS) memory, especially in multilevel cell and multi-bits/cell applications. The secondary electron injection (SEI) is thought to be the root cause of mismatch between injected electrons and holes. A channel hot electron injection (CHEI) programming technique with a positive substrate bias was proposed to effectively suppress SEI effect. In this work, a similar programming method is used in 90 nm localized trapping SONOS devices for multilevel cell and multi-bits/cell storage. In contrast to the reported positive substrate biased CHEI programming, we apply a source bias of 1 V instead of 0 V to prevent the forward-biased source/substrate junction so that the programming power consumption is greatly reduced. It is experimentally found that a sharp electron profile near the junction edge is obtained. A better matched profile of the injected electrons and holes substantially improves the cycling endurance and data retention of 4-bits/cell memory at the four-level states.