Nonvolatile polycrystalline silicon thin-film-transistor memory with oxide/nitride/oxide stack gate dielectrics and nanowire channels

In this work, the authors study a polycrystalline silicon thin-film transistor (poly-Si TFT) with oxide/nitride/oxide (ONO) stack gate dielectrics and multiple nanowire channels for the applications of both nonvolatile silicon-oxide-nitride-oxide-silicon (SONOS) memory and switch transistor. The proposed device named as nanowire SONOS-TFT has superior electrical characteristics of a transistor such as on/off current ratio, threshold voltage (Vth), and subthreshold slope due to the good gate control ability originated from fringing electrical field effects. Moreover, the proposed device under adequate operation scheme can exhibit high program/erase efficiency and good retention time characteristics at high temperature.