Degradation of floating-gate memory reliability by few electron phenomena

A quantitative evaluation of the intrinsic reliability limits of floating-gate (FG) memories in the decananometer range due to the reduction of collective phenomena and to the dominance of single-electron stochastic behaviors is presented. A model that predicts the intrinsic dispersions of the memory retention time and programming window is proposed, and the experimental results obtained on ultrasound memory devices are used to validate this model.