A novel nanowire channel poly-Si TFT functioning as transistor and nonvolatile SONOS memory

Abstract

In this letter, a polycrystalline silicon thin-film transistor consisting of silicon-oxide-nitride-oxide-silicon (SONOS) stack gate dielectric and nanowire (NW) channels was investigated for the applications of transistor and nonvolatile memory. The proposed device, which is named as NW SONOS-TFT, has superior electrical characteristics of transistor, including a higher drain current, a smaller threshold voltage (V-th), and a steeper subthreshold slope. Moreover, the NW SONOS-TFT also can exhibit high program/erase efficiency under adequate bias operation. The duality of both transistor and memory device for the NW SONOS-TFT can be attributed to the trigate structure and channel corner effect.