Formation of SiGe nanocrystals embedded in Al{sub 2}O{sub 3} for the application of write-once-read-many-times memory
- Department of Engineering and System Science, National Tsing-Hua University, 300 Hsinchu, Taiwan (China)
The structure of SiGe nanocrystals embedded in Al{sub 2}O{sub 3} formed by sequential deposition of Al{sub 2}O{sub 3}/Si/Ge/Al{sub 2}O{sub 3} and a subsequent annealing was confirmed by transmission electron microscopy and energy dispersive spectroscopy (EDS), and its application for write-once-read-many-times (WORM) memory devices was explored in this study. By applying a -10 V pulse for 1 s, a large amount of holes injected from Si substrate are stored in the nanocrystals and consequently, the current at +1.5 V increases by a factor of 10{sup 4} as compared to that of the initial state. Even with a smaller -5 V pulse for 1 {mu}s, a sufficiently large current ratio of 36 can still be obtained, verifying the low power operation. Since holes are stored in nanocrystals which are isolated from Si substrate by Al{sub 2}O{sub 3} with good integrity and correspond to a large valence band offset with respect to Al{sub 2}O{sub 3}, desirable read endurance up to 10{sup 5} cycles and excellent retention over 100 yr are achieved. Combining these promising characteristics, WORM memory devices are appropriate for high-performance archival storage applications.
- OSTI ID:
- 22080499
- Journal Information:
- Applied Physics Letters, Vol. 101, Issue 16; Other Information: (c) 2012 American Institute of Physics; Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 0003-6951
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
Similar Records
Impact of metal nano layer thickness on tunneling oxide and memory performance of core-shell iridium-oxide nanocrystals
A Novel Scalable Array Design for III-V Compound Semiconductor-based Nonvolatile Memory (UltraRAM) with Separate Read-Write Paths