Nonvolatile polycrystalline silicon thin-film-transistor memory with oxide/nitride/oxide stack gate dielectrics and nanowire channels

In this work, the authors study a polycrystalline silicon thin-film transistor (poly-Si TFT) with oxide/nitride/oxide (ONO) stack gate dielectrics and multiple nanowire channels for the applications of both nonvolatile silicon-oxide-nitride-oxide-silicon (SONOS) memory and switch transistor. The proposed device named as nanowire SONOS-TFT has superior electrical characteristics of a transistor such as on/off current ratio, threshold voltage (V-th), and subthreshold slope due to the good gate control ability originated from fringing electrical field effects. Moreover, the proposed device under adequate operation scheme can exhibit high program/erase efficiency and good retention time characteristics at high temperature. (c) 2007 American Institute of Physics.