Recent Patents in Semiconductor Nanocluster Floating Gate Flash Memory

Nanoclusters (NC) as charge storage nodes have been applied in nonvolatile, high-speed, high-density and low-power memory devices. Compared with conventional floating gate memory, where a layer of poly-Si is used for charge storage, a memory device composed of nanoclusters isolated by dielectrics benefits from a relatively low operating voltage, high endurance, fast write-erase speeds and better immunity to soft errors due to the quantum confinement and Coulomb blockade effects. Recent patents in this field have proposed several innovated structures and fabrication methods for nanocluster based floating gate flash memory and single-electron memory devices.