| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立交通大學 === 奈米科技研究所 === 96 === Recently, nonvolatile memory with nanocrystals (NCs) has been widely studied to overcome limitations of conventional floating gate memory. The use of NCs as distributed floating gates minimized the problems of charge loss encountered in conventional floating-gate devices, allowing thinner tunnel oxide and, thereby, a smaller working voltage, better endurance and retention, and faster program/erase (P/E) speed.
Compared to the semiconductor NCs, metallic NCs as floating gates possesses several advantages, such as larger change of electric capacity, stronger coupling with the conduction channel, a wide range of available work functions, higher density of states around the Fermi level, and a smaller energy perturbation due to carrier confinement.
In this thesis, iridium was chosen as floating gates for its properties of high work function and thermal stability for NVM application. The metallic thermal agglomeration
was investigated using thin iridium films under different rapid thermal annealing (RTA).Mechanism of nanocrystals formation has been investigated. A MOS capacitor with
iridium NCs (Ir-NCs) embedded in SiO2 and HfO2 layers has been demonstrated for investigation of electrical properties. Furthermore, incorporation of Ir-NCs into
process of MOSFETs has been demonstrated for the feasibility of this study in NVM application.
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