Trigated Poly-Si Nanowire SONOS Devices for Flat-Panel Applications

Abstract

A new method is proposed and demonstrated to fabricate planar thin-film transistors and trigated nanowire (NW) devices simultaneously on the same panel. By using an oxide-nitride oxide stack as the gate dielectric, the NW devices could also serve as nonvolatile Si-oxide-nitride-oxide-Si (SONOS) memory devices. Our results indicate that the combination of trigate and NW channels help to improve the device performance in terms of steppers subthreshold swing and reduced threshold voltage. Improvement in programming and erasing efficiency of the nonvolatile SONOS memory devices is also demonstrated with the trigated NW structure.