Silicon nanowire on oxide/nitride/oxide for memory application

We report the fabrication and characterization of Si nanowire memory devices with oxide/nitride/oxide stacked layers as the gate dielectrics and charge storage media. The devices were fabricated by using photolithography to pattern the metal contacts to the Si nanowires grown on pre-defined locations. A large memory window with high on/off-state current ratio due to the small radius and intrinsic doping of the Si nanowire is obtained. In addition, the simple reversible write/read/erase operations have been implemented with these memory devices. The dynamics of the nanowire/nitride charge exchange and its effect on the threshold voltage and memory retention have been investigated.