Pi-shape gate polycrystalline silicon thin-film transistor for nonvolatile memory applications

Abstract

In this work, we studied a pi-shape gate polycrystalline silicon thin-film transistor (poly-Si TFT) with silicon-oxide-nitride-oxide-silicon (SONOS) layers and nanowire channels for the application of electric driver and nonvolatile memory. The proposed pi-gate TFT-SONOS has superior transfer characteristics and its output characteristic also exhibits the high driving current and the suppression of the kink effect. For memory application, the device can provide high program/erase efficiency and large threshold voltage shift under adequate bias operation. The enhanced performance for the pi-gate TFT-SONOS is attributed to the larger effective channel width and the number of channel corners. (C) American Institute of Physics.