Facile sol-gel preparation of nanocrystal embedded thin film material for memory device

A promising charge trapping film with crystal embedded material is proposed for future electronic devices. Instead of conventional high-vacuum and expensive tool, this technique adopts very cheaper process of sol-gel spin-coating for fabrication of thin film material in the charge trapping flash memory (CTFM). The crystal from spinodal phase separation is observed for sol-gel thin film at 900 C annealing, and is strongly related to the thickness of the spin-coated thin film. The morphology of the crystal from the ethanol solvent system is in the isolated form, while from 2-propanol solvent is in the interconnected structure. The sol-gel-derived CTFM from ethanol exhibits the better memory performance of retention times for <5 and <10 % charge loss at applied temperature of 25 and 85 C, respectively. The ethanol system CTFM demonstrates a large memory window (~10 V) and good reliability than 2-propanol (~3 V) due to the existence of several isolated crystals in silicon dioxide film.