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For a floating gate MOSFET, in order to make the control gate work you have to(generally speaking) make the oxide layer thin(~100 Angstroms) as well as the ONO(Oxygen nitride, acts as an insulator) layer(~200 Angstroms). However, making it too thin causes electric leakage. What I want to know is, why does it seem like none of these limitations apply to the floating gate layer?

In a lot of schematics for FG-MOSFETS, the floating gate layer is always much bigger (~1500 Angstroms) than the Oxide and ONO layers. But making the FG thick only puts the control gate farther away, so it seems like it doesn't really matter how thick you make the FG, the same amount of charge passes through anyway, why is this? I know that you don't need a large threshold voltage since a charged floating gate interference between the CG and the semiconductor will increase the voltage differential in a cell that's been programmed. I'm guessing that it has something to do with conductivity, but I don't know enough about electrical engineering to be sure.

FGmos

Sorry for the confusing post, but electronics isn't my major, so I don't know if I have all the terms correctly. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

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Richard Roe
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    *But making the FG thick only puts the control gate farther away* Yes but the floating gate is **conductive** so it's thickness does not matter. When a voltage is applied, the electrical field will be across the **insulating** oxide layers. So althoug the Control gate will be "further away" from the substrate, that does not matter. It's the oxide thickness that matters. Conductivity is not involved here, the important effect is the **tunneling**, this pull/pushes the electrons to/from the floating gate. – Bimpelrekkie Apr 13 '16 at 20:13
  • I'm guessing here but the thickness of the floating gate might not be of so much importance to this type of transistor, although it might be to "catch" all the electrons that come tunneling through the oxide (at high speed). That gate structure migth also be used for "normal" transistors which do need a thick gate to keep the gate series resistance low (which is needed for speed). Re-using layers/gates for other devices is very common on IC fabrication processes. – Bimpelrekkie Apr 13 '16 at 20:18
  • So the thickness of the FG doesn't matter because it's conductive, and the electric field happens between the oxide layers due to tunneling. So the FG in this scenario is there just to ferry the electrons to the two oxide layers? – Richard Roe Apr 17 '16 at 21:16
  • Yes, that is the case. – Bimpelrekkie Apr 18 '16 at 08:14

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short version: The assumption "What I want to know is, why does it seem like none of these limitations apply to the floating gate layer?" is incorrect, but with some caveats.

You can make a floating gate on any process if you have your oxide clean enough. Your "grown oxide" between the channel and the first layer is much better because it doesn't have traps caused by impurities that you see by the deposited oxides; however, it's actually a bit more complicated than that because with cycles of injection, you do see leakage back from the gate to the drain edge.

For analog processes, I build floating-gates that look something like this: double poly floating gate

They look different when I'm just making digital storage, but for this demonstration, the analog floating gate layout makes the most sense. I make the node negative by putting charge on the floating poly through hot electron injection, which is classical physics. I make the node positive through the tunneling junction.

When you inject, you are heating carriers and if you are lucky (not really, the work by Hasler outlines this explicitly), some make it on to the gate, such as: Injection bands

Injection is a function of field, so you have a high field at the drain edge. Some of the electrons can get stuck in the oxide and you start seeing band-to-band tunneling after a bunch of cycles. The grown oxide is clean, but not perfect. How many cycles? It depends on how fast you tried to program things. If I put a device in subthreshold and put a large Vds (larger than process) across it and hold it for a day, it basically throws enough charge in the oxide that you can watch the leakage. For the process voltage, I usually get about 100k writes at the process voltage before things go bad. This is the same issue that causes FLASH drives to get stuck sectors.

b degnan
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