Alpha-induced soft errors in Floating Gate flash memories

Abstract

We study the sensitivity to alpha particles of state-of-the-art Multi-Level Cell (MLC) and Single-Level Cell (SLC) NAND Floating Gate (FG) flash memories with NAND architecture. We show that starting from a feature size of 50 nm, MLC flash memories are sensitive to alpha particles, whereas SLC devices do not show any sensitivity down to a feature size of 34 nm. We calculate the alpha-induced soft error rates on the field, discuss technology trends in comparison to heavy-ions.