High-performance gate-all-around polycrystalline silicon nanowire with silicon nanocrystals nonvolatile memory

Nonvolatile memory (NVM) that is based on gate-all-around (GAA) and polycrystalline silicon (poly-Si) nanowires structure with silicon nanocrystals (NCs) as the storage nodes is demonstrated. The GAA poly-Si–SiO2–Si3N4–SiO2–poly-Si (SONOS) NVMs are also fabricated and compared. The GAA NCs NVMs have a 4.2 V of threshold voltage shift at 18 V for 1 ms, and are faster than the GAA SONOS NVMs do. In reliability studies, this NVM shows superior endurance after 104 program/erase (P/E) cycles, and loses only 14% of its charges lose after ten years at 85 °C.