Studies on nature of defect centers and charge trapping characteristics of silicon nitride films and low dielectric constant dielectric films for the nonvolatile memory applications

研究了氮化硅薄膜中K心的性质。结果表明，在氮化物薄膜中，顺磁K^0中心是电子空穴对的产生中心。研究还表明，在本研究中制造的存储器件中的氮化硅薄膜中的空穴陷阱位置不是K中心。此外，使用低温催化化学气相沉积（Cat-CVD）形成具有高密度空穴陷阱的氮化硅膜。Cat-CVD氮化物膜在存储元件的擦除条件下提供了上级保持特性。我们还表明，低介电常数的SiCN膜产生足够的电荷捕获非易失性存储器设备的电介质层的保留特性。

The nature of the K centers in silicon nitride films was investigated. We revealed that the paramagnetic K^0 centers acted as generation centers of electron-hole pairs in the nitride films. It was also shown that hole trap sites in the silicon nitride films in memory devices fabricated in the present study were not K centers. In addition, silicon nitride films with a high density of hole traps were formed using low-temperature catalytic chemical vapor deposition(Cat-CVD). The Cat-CVD nitride films provided the superior retention characteristics in the erase condition of memory elements. We also showed that low-dielectric constant SiCN films yielded sufficient retention characteristics for the charge trapping dielectric layer of nonvolatile memory devises.