Neutron-Induced Upsets in NAND Floating Gate Memories

Abstract

We investigate atmospheric neutron effects on floating-gate cells in NAND Flash memory devices. Charge loss is shown to occur, particularly at the highest program levels, causing raw bit errors in multilevel cell NAND, but to an extent that does not challenge current mandatory error correction specifications. We discuss the physical mechanisms and analyze scaling trends, which show a rapid increase in sensitivity for decreasing feature size.