Charge storage in a nitride-oxide-silicon medium by scanning capacitance microscopy

In this paper we describe a variant of the scanning capacitance microscope (SCaM) which is based on the atomic force microscope. Our SCaM involves a cantilever beam that is used to press a conducting tip against a conducting substrate coated with a dielectric film. A capacitance sensor is then used to measure the tip-sample capacitance as a function of lateral position. The deflection of the cantilever can also be used to measure independently the surface topography. This microscope can be used to measure electrical properties of dielectric films and their underlying substrates. We have applied this microscope to the study of the nitride-oxide-silicon (NOS) system. This system has been studied extensively because of its ability to store information by trapping charge in the silicon nitride. Commercial semiconductor nonvolatile memories have been designed using this NOS technology. We have used the SCaM tip to apply a localized bias to the NOS sample, causing charge to tunnel through the oxide layer and to be trapped in the nitride film. This trapped charge induces a depletion region in the silicon substrate, which can be detected by the resulting depletion capacitance between the tip and sample. The stored charge can be interpreted as a digital memory. Bit sizes as small as 750 Å full width at half maximum have been stored using this technique. The stored charge has been observed to be stable over a period of seven days. The stored charge can be removed by applying a reverse bias to the region, and the bit can be subsequently rewritten. By simultaneously measuring capacitance and topography images, we have demonstrated that the stored information is not the result of any topographic change to the surface. Simulations of the potential distributions resulting from this trapped charge have been performed and are compared with the experiments. Finally, a discussion is presented on the ultimate density and speed limits of such a storage technology.