Neutron-induced soft errors in advanced flash memories

Abstract

Atmospheric neutrons are a known source of Soft Errors (SE), in static [1] and dynamic [2] CMOS memories. This paper shows for the first time that atmospheric neutrons are able to induce SE in Flash memories as well. Detailed experimental results provide an explanation linking the Floating Gate (FG) cell SE rate to the physics of the neutron-matter interaction. The neutron sensitivity is expected to increase with the number of bits per cell and the reduction of the feature size, but the SE issue is within the limit of current ECC capabilities and will remain so in the foreseeable future.