The influence of thermally assisted tunneling on the performance of charge trapping memory

We evaluate the influence of thermally assisted tunneling (ThAT) mechanism on charge trapping memory (CTM) cell performance by numerical simulation, and comprehensively analyse the effects of temperature, trap depth, distribution of trapped charge, gate voltage and parameters of ThAT on erasing/programming speed and retention performance. The ThAT is an indispensable mechanism in CTM. This mechanism can increase the detrapping probability of trapped charge. Our results reveal that the ThAT effect causes the sensitivity of the cell performance to temperature and it could affect the operational speed, especially for the erasing operation. The retention performance degrades compared with the results when the ThAT mechanism is ignored.