Study of Electrical Characteristics and Charge Storage Behaviour of Gold Embedded Floating Gate MOS Structure

Non-volatile memory(NVM) devices are of great interest because of their memory capacities in the form of charge storage, scalability and retention capabilities. A Metal-Oxide Semiconductor (MOS) structure with a tunnel oxide, control oxide and a composite gate dielectric embedded with Gold (Au) nano-crystals(nc) has been studied in this paper. This work represents a theoretical analysis of leakage current in the form of field emission or the Fowler-Nordheim (F-N) tunneling current in the designed structure. The lowering of the onset voltage in the F-N tunneling current expressed the high retention capacity or low writing voltage of the NVM structure. The proposed device structure shows a considerable memory window when the voltage sweeps from -6V to + 15V back and forth. Additionally, the transfer characteristics of the nanoparticles-embedded MOS transistor have been studied well in this paper. This kind of proposed NVM structure, owing to its charge storing capacity and scalability can find immense application in the field of nonvolatile memory design.