This paper describes the new write/erase operation methods in order to improve the read disturb characteristics for Flash EEPROM cells which are written by channel hot electron injection and erased by F-N tunneling emission from the floating gate to the substrate. The new operation methods is either applying a reverse polarity pulse after each erase pulse or applying a series of shorter erase pulses instead of a long single erase pulse. It is confirmed that by using the above operation methods, the leakage current can be suppressed, and then the read disturb life time after 105 cycles write/erase operation is more than 10 times longer in comparison with the conventional method. This memory cell by using the proposed write/erase operation method has superior potential for application to 256 Mbit Flash memories as beyond.

This paper describes a new reduction mechanism of the stress induced leakage current that is induced by step tunneling of electrons through the step tunneling sites. The concept of this mechanism is based on the deactivation of step tunneling sites for thin oxide. It is verified that the deactivation is electrically realized by the injected electrons int the sites. It is because the step tunneling probability of electrons though the deactivated sites is suppressed, since the electron capture cross section of the neutralized deactivation sites becomes extremely low. The deactivation scheme is as follows: (1) The deactivation of tunneling sites can be realized that the tunneling sites trapped holes change to neutralized tunneling sites due to electrons injection. (2) The injected electron can deactivate the activation tunneling sites only under energy level than the energy level of the injected electrons. It is shown that the above reduction phenomenon can be quantifiably with formulation. These results are very important for high reliable thin oxide films and for high performance ULSI.

This paper describes the analysis of the Stacked-Surrounding Gate Transistor (S-SGT) DRAM for the high speed and low voltage operation. The S-SGT DRAM is based on the new three dimensional (3D)-building memory array technology. In terms of the bit-lines signal voltage for read operation, it is found that the signal voltage of the S-SGT DRAM is larger than that of the conventional planar DRAM, the NAND-structured DRAM, and the SGT DRAM. The signal voltage of the S-SGT DRAM was found to depend on the pillar radius, the distance between the bit-line and the substrate, and the number of cells connected to one bit-line in comparison with the above three kinds of conventional DRAMs. Especially, with reducing the pillar radius (R), the signal voltage of the S-SGT DRAM becomes larger. In the concrete, in case that R is 0. 25 µm, the signal voltage of the S-SGT DRAM is about 160%, 160% and 120% in comparison with the planar DRAM, the SGT DRAM and the NAND-structured DRAM, respectively. Therefore, the S-SGT DRAM can realize larger S/N ratio. This advantage can realize the high speed and low voltage operation. Moreover, in case that the signal voltage is constant (0.15 V), the maximum number of cells connected to one bit-line for the S-SGT DRAM is about 2 times in comparison with the planar DRAM. This advantage makes it possible to reduce the number of both sense amplifiers and bit-lines. This is very suitable for reducing the total chip size of the S-SGT DRAM. Above all, it was found that the S-SGT DRAM is one of candidates for the high speed and low voltage operation DRAM in the future.

A low VDD current mirror with deep sub-micron vertical MOSFETs is presented. The keys are new bias circuits to reduce both the minimum VDD for the operation and the sensitivity of the output current on VDD. In the simulation, our circuits reduce the minimum VDD by about 17% and the VDD sensitivity by one order both from those of the conventional. In the simulation with 90nm φ vertical MOSFET approximate models, our circuit shows about 4MΩ output resistance at 1.2-V VDD with the small temperature dependence, which is about six times as large as that with planar MOSFETs.

In this paper, we propose a new low power nonvolatile counter unit based on Magnetic Tunnel Junction (MTJ) with fine-grained power gating. The proposed counter unit consists of only a single latch with two MTJs. We verify the basic operation and estimate the power consumption of the proposed counter unit. The operating power consumption of the proposed nonvolatile counter unit is smaller than the conventional one below 140 kHz. The power of the proposed unit is 74.6% smaller than the conventional one at low frequency.

In this paper, a Schmitt Trigger based 10T SRAM (ST 10T SRAM) cell with the vertical MOSFET is proposed for low supply voltage operation, and its impacts on cell size, stability and speed performance are investigated. The proposed ST 10T SRAM cell with the vertical MOSFET achieves smaller cell size than the ST 10T SRAM cell with the conventional planar MOSFET. Moreover, the proposed SRAM cell realizes large and constant static noise margin (SNM) against bottom node resistance of the vertical MOSFET without any architectural changes from the present 6T SRAM architecture. The proposed SRAM cell also suppresses the degradation of the read time of the ST 10T SRAM cell due to the back-bias effect free characteristic of the vertical MOSFET. The proposed ST 10T SRAM cell with the vertical MOSFET is a superior SRAM cell for low supply voltage operation with a small cell size, stable operation, and fast speed performance with the present 6T SRAM architecture.

Recently, the 3-dimensional (3-D) vertical Floating Gate (FG) type NAND flash memory cell arrays with the Extended Sidewall Control Gate (ESCG) was proposed [7]. Using this novel structure, we successfully implemented superior program speed, read current, and less interference characteristics, by the high Control Gate (CG) coupling ratio with less interference capacitance and highly electrical inverted S/D technique. However, the process stability of the ESCG structure has not been sufficiently confirmed such as the variations of the physical dimensions. In this paper, we intensively investigated the electrical dependency according to the physical dimensions of ESCG, such as the line and spacing of ESCG and the thickness of barrier oxide. Using the 2-dimentional (2-D) TCAD simulations, we compared the basic characteristics of the FG type flash cell operation, in the aspect of program speed, read current, and interference effect. Finally, we check the process window and suggest the optimum target of the ESCG structure for reliable flash cell operation. From above all, we confirmed that this 3-dimensional vertical FG NAND flash memory cell arrays using the ESCG structure is the most attractive candidate for terabit 3-D vertical NAND flash cell array.

In this paper, a theoretical analysis of current-controlled (CC-) MOS current mode logic (MCML) is reported. Furthermore, the circuit performance of the CC-MCML with the auto-detection of threshold voltage (Vth) fluctuation is evaluated. The proposed CC-MCML with the auto-detection of Vth fluctuation automatically suppresses the degradation of circuit performance induced by the Vth fluctuations of the transistors automatically, by detecting these fluctuations. When a Vth fluctuation of ± 0.1 V occurs on the circuit, the cutoff frequency of the circuit is increased from 0 Hz to 3.5 GHz by using the proposed CC-MCML with the auto-detection of Vth fluctuation.

We propose the collective electron tunneling model in the electron injection process between the Nano Dots (NDs) and the two-dimensional electron gas (2DEG). We report the collective motion of electrons between the 2DEG and the NDs based on the measurement of the Si-ND floating gate structure in the previous studies. However, the origin of this collective motion has not been revealed yet. We evaluate the proposed tunneling model by the model calculation. We reveal that our proposed model reproduces the collective motion of electrons. The insight obtained by our model shows new viewpoints for designing future nano-electronic devices.

We have studied the transport property of the Vertical MOSFET (V-MOSFET) with an impurity from the viewpoint of quantum electron dynamics. In order to obtain the position dependence of impurity for the electron transmission property through the channel of the V-MOSFET, we solve the time-dependent Shrodinger equation in real space mesh technique We reveal that the impurity in the source edge can assist the electron transmission from the source to drain working as a wave splitter. In addition, we also reveal the effect of an impurity in the surface of pillar is limited because of its dimensionality. Furthermore, we obtained that the electron injection from the source to the channel becomes difficult due to the energy difference between the subbands of the source and the channel. These results enable us to obtain the guiding principle to design the V-MOSFET in the 10 nm pillar. The results enable us to obtain the guiding principle to design the V-MOSFET beyond 20 nm design rule.

As the integration density and capacitance of semiconductor devices have increased, high-dielectric (High-k) materials have attracted considerable attention. We investigated the dependence of threshold voltage (Vth) characteristics of the High-k/Metal Gate MOSFET fabricated with 65 nm CMOS process on the temperature, in comparison to conventional SiON/Poly-Si Gate MOSFET. Two aspects including the Fermi level and the channel mobility in MOSFET are discussed in details. Furthermore, the influence of threshold voltage characteristics of the High-k/Metal Gate MOSFET on the logic threshold voltage (Vth-inv) of CMOS inverter is reported in this paper.

We have succeeded in fabricating 180 nm Current Controlled MOS Current Mode Logic (CC-MCML) and verified the stable circuit operation of 180 nm CC-MCML under threshold voltage fluctuations by measurement. The performance stability of the CC-MCML inverter under the fluctuations of threshold voltage of NMOS and PMOS is evaluated from the viewpoint of diminishing the bias offset voltage ΔVB. The ΔVB, that is defined as (base voltage of output waveform) - (base voltage of input waveform), is a key design parameter for differential circuit. It is shown that when the threshold voltage of NMOS fluctuates in the range of 0.53 V to 0.69 V, and threshold voltage of PMOS fluctuates in the range of -0.47 V to -0.67 V, the CC-MCML technique is able to suppress ΔVB within only 30 mV, where as the conventional MCML technique caused maximum ΔVB of 1.0 V. In this paper, it is verified for the first time that the fabricated CC-MCML is more tolerant against the fluctuations of threshold voltages than the conventional MCML.

In this paper, Source/Drain (S/D) engineering for high performance (HP) Vertical MOSFET (V-MOSFET) in 3Xnm generation and its beyond is investigated, by using gradual S/D profile while degradation of driving current (ION) due to the parasitic series resistance (Rpara) is minimized through two-dimensional device simulation taking into account for gate-induced-drain-leakage (GIDL). In general, it is significant to reduce spreading resistance in the case of conventional Planar MOSFET. Therefore, in this study, we focused and analyzed the abruptness of diffusion layer that is still importance parameter in V-MOSFET. First, for improving the basic device performance such as subthreshold swing (SS), ION, and Rpara, S/D engineering is investigated. The dependency of device performance on S/D abruptness (σS/D) for various Lightly Doped Drain Extension (LDD) abruptness (σLDD) is analyzed. In this study, Spacer Length (LSP) is defined as a function of σS/D. As σS/D becomes smaller and S/D becomes more abrupt, LSP becomes shorter. SS depends on the σS/D rather than the σLDD. ION has the peak value of 1750 µA/µm at σS/D = 2 nm/dec. and σLDD=3 nm/dec. when the silicon pillar diameter (D) is 30 nm and the gate length (Lg) is 60 nm. As σS/D becomes small, higher ION is obtained due to reduction of Rpara while SS is degraded. However, when σS/D becomes too small in the short channel devices (Lg = 60 nm and Lg = 45 nm), ION is degraded because the leakage current due to GIDL is increased and reaches IOFF limit of 100 nA/µm. In addition, as σLDD becomes larger, larger ION is obtained in the case of Lg = 100 nm and Lg = 60 nm because channel length becomes shorter. On the other hand, in the case of Lg = 45 nm, as σLDD becomes larger, ION is degraded because short channel effect (SCE) becomes significant. Next, the dependency of the basic device performance on D is investigated. By slimming D from 30 nm to 10 nm, while SS is improved and approaches the ideal value of 60 mV/Decade, ION is degraded due to increase of on-resistance (Ron). From these results, it is necessary to reduce Rpara while IOFF meets limit of 100 nA/µm for designing S/D of HP V-MOSFET. Especially for the V-MOSFET in the 1Xnm generation and its beyond, the influence of the Rpara and GIDL on ION becomes more significant, and therefore, the trade-off between σS/D and ION has a much greater impact on S/D engineering of V-MOSFET.

This paper describes the evaluation of the Voltage Down Converter (VDC) with low ratio of consuming current to load current in DC/AC operation mode. The stability, response and power consumption are investigated. First, for the stability and response, the VDC can operate in the condition that the bounce of the down voltage (dVDL) is no more than 10% of the setting voltage and the maximum load operation frequency (fmax) is 100 MHz at the average load current 70 mA (the maximum load current 140 mA). Secondly, for the power consumption, by using this VDC technology, the value of IC/IL can be suppressed to 5.1E-4 (IC: total consuming current in VDC, IL: average load current) in the condition that dVDL is no more than 10% of the setting voltage and fmax is 10 MHz at the average load current 70 mA. Thus, it is made clear that the VDC can realize high stability, good response and low power consumption at the same time. This technology is suitable for high performance ULSIs which require large load current and low-power consumption.

A high performance voltage down converter (VDC) is proposed in this paper. The proposed VDC can automatically control the driving current in seven phases to reduce the fluctuation of output voltage in VDC. By using above new flexible control technology of driving current, the fluctuation of output voltage can be suppressed to less than 10% and the average consuming current of VDC can be suppressed to 34 µA, even if the operation frequency is 200 MHz at the average driving current 100 mA. Therefore, the proposed VDC can operate with large driving current, low-power consumption and good response at the same time. Above all, this technology is very suitable for high perform ULSIs which require large load current, very low-power and high speed operation.

A steady-state current-voltage characteristics of fully-depleted surrounding gate transistor (FD-SGT) with short channel effects, such as threshold voltage lowering and channel length modulation, is analyzed. First, new threshold voltage model of FD-SGT, which takes threshold voltage lowering caused by decreasing channel length into consideration, are proposed. We express surface potential as capacitance couple between channel and other electrodes such as gate, source and drain. And we analyze how surface potential distribution deviates from long channel surface potential distribution with source and drain effects when channel length becomes short. Next, by using newly proposed model, current-voltage characteristics equation with short channel effects is analytically formulated for the first time. In comparison with a three-dimensional (3D) device simulator, the results of newly proposed threshold voltage model show good agreement within 0.011 V average error. And newly formulated current-voltage characteristics equation also shows good agreement within 0.95% average error. The results of this work make it possible to clear the device designs of FD-SGT theoretically and show the new viewpoints for future ULSI's with SGT.

In this paper, we propose the novel Dynamic Feedback (DF-) MCML technique for high-speed and high-gain MCML type latch. The concept of the proposed DF-MCML technique is as follows; the output node signal is feedbacked to the input node in Sampling-Mode, and the output node is opened from the input node in Holding-Mode. It is shown by analytic theory that by this dynamic feedback sequence, both stability and sensibility of latch in Sampling-Mode is exponentially improved, and the gain of latch in Holding-Mode is drastically increased. Finally, we have numerically investigated the circuit performance of the novel DF-MCML type latch in comparison with the conventional MCML type latch by using P-Spice simulator. The maximum operation frequency of 180 nm DF-MCML type latch reaches over 20 GHz that is 2 times than the conventional MCML type latch. It is made clear that the proposed novel Dynamic Feedback MCML technique is suitable for over 10 GHz high-speed and high-gain Si ULSIs.

In this paper, we compare 1/f noise characteristics of High-k/Metal Gate MOSFET and SiON/Poly-Si Gate MOSFET experimentally, and evaluate the time fluctuation of drive current. These MOSFETs are fabricated with 65 nm CMOS process, and their gate lengths (Lg) are 130 nm. Specifically, we focus on the dependency of the time fluctuation of drive current on channel width (W) and temperature (T). First, we evaluate the dependency on channel width. In the case of SiON/Poly-Si Gate MOSFET, when the channel width is narrow such as W=200 nm and W=250 nm, Power Spectrum Density (PSD) depends on 1/f2 at two frequency regions. Moreover, as the channel width is wide such as W=300 nm, W=500 nm and W=1000 nm, PSD depends on 1/f and the value of PSD shifts lower. This is a new phenomena observed for the first time. On the other hand, in the case of High-k/Metal Gate MOSFET, the value of PSD is about 100 times larger than that of SiON/Poly-Si Gate MOSFET. Moreover, there is no dependency of PSD on channel width ranges from 150 nm to 1000 nm. Second, we evaluate the dependency on temperature. In the case of SiON/Poly-Si Gate MOSFET, when the temperature (T) is lowered from T=27 to T=-35, the dependency changes from the 1/f dependency to the 1/f2 dependency at two different frequency regions. This is also a new phenomena observed for the first time. However, in the case of High-k/Metal Gate MOSFET, there is no dependency of PSD on temperature ranges from 27 to -35. These results are useful knowledge for designing future LSI, because PSD dependency shows different characteristics when both channel width and temperature are changed.

In this paper, the effect of Halo concentration on performance of 30 nm gate length Double-Gate MOSFET with 30 nm thin body-Si is investigated by using two dimensional device simulator. We quantitatively show the dependency of electrical characteristic (subthreshold-slope, threshold voltage: Vth, drivability and leak current: Ion and Ioff) on the Halo concentration. This dependency can be explained by the reasons why the Halo concentration has directly effect on the potential distribution of the body. It is made clear that from viewpoint of body potential control, the design of Halo concentration is key technology for suppressing short-channel effect and improving subthreshold-slope, Ion and Ioff adjusting the Vth.