Auger electron spectroscopy has been used in conjunction with argon-ion sputtering to study the morphology and chemical nature of MNOS structures. We find that a typical thin "oxide" in a memory device is a silicon oxynitride with about equal parts nitrogen and oxygen. The transition from nitride to "oxide" to silicon is a smooth one, with an oxide width of about 2.5-nm FWHM.
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Johannessen et al. (1977) studied this question.