Electrical properties of silicon nanocrystals embedded in amorphous SiO₂ films

Nonvolatile memory chips with low power consumption and low cost have attracted increasing attention due to the booming portable electronic devices market, particularly devices such as cellular phones and digital cameras. There are mainly four types of nonvolatile memory technologies: flash memory, ferro-electric random access memory, magnetic random access memory, and phase change memory. Among these, flash memory can achieve the highest chip density and possesses multi-bit per cell storage capability [1-3]. Therefore, it has become the mainstream nonvolatile memory technology nowadays. Furthermore, flash memory enjoys a fabrication process compatible with the current complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) process, and thus has become a suitable solution for embedded memory applications.