Extraction of nitride trap density from stress induced leakage current in silicon-oxide-nitride-oxide-silicon flash memory

The authors propose a technique to extract a silicon nitride trap density from stress induced leakage current in a polycrystalline silicon-oxide-nitride-oxide-silicon flash memory cell. An analytical model based on the Frenkel-Poole emission is developed to correlate a nitride trap density with stress induced leakage current. The extracted nitride trap density is 7.0×1012cm−2eV−1. They find that nitride trapped charges have a rather uniform distribution in an energy range of measurement (∼0.2eV).