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Floating Gate

Floating gate transistors are commonly used for non-volatile storage such as flash memory. They contain a normal MOSFET transistor and one or more capacitors to couple control voltages to the floating gate, which is entirely surrounded by oxide. This allows electrical charge to be stored on the floating gate for extended periods without power. The stored charge can be modified by applying voltages to terminals, causing phenomena like Fowler-Nordheim tunneling or hot carrier injection that move charge onto the floating gate.

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24 views

Floating Gate

Floating gate transistors are commonly used for non-volatile storage such as flash memory. They contain a normal MOSFET transistor and one or more capacitors to couple control voltages to the floating gate, which is entirely surrounded by oxide. This allows electrical charge to be stored on the floating gate for extended periods without power. The stored charge can be modified by applying voltages to terminals, causing phenomena like Fowler-Nordheim tunneling or hot carrier injection that move charge onto the floating gate.

Uploaded by

hydra pro
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Floating gate

The floating-gate transistor is a kind of transistor that is commonly used for non-
volatile storage such as flash, EPROM and EEPROM memory. Floating-gate transistors are
almost always floating-gate MOSFETs. Floating-gate MOSFETs are useful because of their
ability to store an electrical charge for extended periods of time even without a
connection to a power supply. Floating-gate MOSFETs are composed of a normal MOSFET
and one or more capacitors used to couple control voltages to the floating gate. Oxide
surrounds the floating gate entirely, so charge trapped on the floating gate remains
there. The charge stored on the floating gate can be modified by applying voltages to the
source, drain, body and control gate terminals (since we have
Vfg=Ccg/CT*Vcg+Cs/CT*Vs+Cd/CT*Vd+Cb/CT*Vb) such that the fields result in phenomena
like Fowler-Nordheim tunneling and hot carrier injection.

Hot carrier injection is the phenomenon in solid state devices or semiconductors where
either an electron or a "hole" gains sufficient kinetic energy to overcome a potential
barrier, becoming a "hot carrier", and then migrates to a different area of the device. The
term usually refers to the effect in a MOSFET where a carrier is injected from the silicon
substrate, to the gate dielectric. To become 'hot', and enter the conduction band of the
dielectric, an electron must gain a kinetic energy of 3.3eV (for an SiO2 dielectric). For
holes the valence band offset dictates they must have a kinetic energy of 4.6eV. Often,
this results in the carrier's no longer being in its originally designed position and as such,
hot carrier injection represents a degradation phenomenon in the device. Hot carriers can
degrade the gate dielectric causing electron and hole traps to form which increase the
leakage current and cause shifts in the threshold voltage and ultimately, the device will
become unstable and fail. However, flash memory exploits the principle of hot carrier
injection by deliberately injecting a carrier and having it reside at the floating gate where
in memory terms it represents a '1' until such time as the memory is erased, and the
carrier is removed from the gate.

There are several mechanisms which can cause hot carrier injection. Since carriers are
accelerated by the strength of the electric field, designs which use too high a voltage
coupled with a small dielectric thickness will create a stronger field across the layer and
increase the presence of hot carriers. Since a carrier gains kinetic energy in the electric
field only while it has "room to run", and this "room" is essentially the mean-free path of
the carrier, and since mean-free path in turn decreases with increasing temperature, low
operating temperatures can be a problem. This is the opposite of most wear-out
phenomena in solid state electronics.

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