Atmel, CEA-Leti to work on nanocrystal flash
Anne-Francoise Pele
EE Times
(04/12/2006 10:40 AM EDT)
PARIS — Atmel Corp. and Leti, the applied research laboratory in electronics operated by the French Atomic Energy Commission (CEA), announced Wednesday (April 12) that they have concluded a collaborative agreement on silicon “nanocrystal” technology for use in flash memory. The first results of the collaboration are expected to be published before the end of the year 2006.
The R&D agreement calls for the sharing of scientific knowledge and material resources between the two partners. It is specifically based on the “short loops” procedure, developed by the CEA-Leti (Grenoble, France) to enable a rapid and secure circulation of silicon wafers between the clean rooms of the CEA-Leti, situated on the Minatec Campus in Grenoble, and Atmel’s wafer fab in Rousset (France).
The silicon nanocrystal technology developed under the program is then set to be integrated into Atmel’s on-going R&D project for next generation non-volatile memories, called Erevna. The overall objective of this project is to develop non-volatile and embedded non-volatile memories at the 130-nm, 90-nm, and 65-nm nodes, for use up to the year 2009.
Nanocrystaline silicon, with the crystal dislocations used to store charge, is being touted as a way forward for flash memory, which may otherwise have problems in scaling due to charge leakage. Conventional floating-gate flash includes a deposited layer of polycrystaline silicon to hold the charge. As scaling proceeds, it has become increasingly difficult to avoid defects that allow charge to leak away. By moving to about 600 or so nanocrystals, measuring about 50 angstroms in diameter each, the bit cell gains an immunity from breaks in the floating-gate layer.
Freescale Semiconductor Inc.announced the demonstration of a nanocrystal flash memory of 24-Mbit capacity, as another step toward introducing nanocrystal flash at the 65-nm node, in November 2005.
CEA-Leti brings ten years of experience in the field of nanocrystal silicon for microelectronics, and Atmel offers its expertise in the development of advanced products and leading-edge technologies. Through its partnership with the CEA-Leti, Atmel aims, “to rapidly improve the performance of its flash memories and to anticipate the advance to the 65 nanometer technology,” the company said in a statement. |
