Abstract:
A semiconductor memory and a method of producing the memory, includes a transistor including a first gate having an oxide, and a channel, and a back-plane including a second gate and an oxide thereover, the second gate formed opposite to the channel of the transistor, the second gate including a floating gate, wherein a thickness of the oxide of the back-plane is separately scalable from an oxide of the first gate of the transistor.
Abstract:
A densely packed array of vertical semiconductor devices, having pillars, deep trench capacitors, vertical transistors, and methods of making thereof are disclosed. The pillars act as transistor channels, and may be formed utilizing the application of hybrid resist over a block of semiconductor material. Drain doped regions are formed on the top of each pillar. The source doped regions and the plate doped regions are self-aligned and are created by diffusion in the trenches surrounding the pillars. The array has columns of bitlines and rows of wordlines. The capacitors are formed by isolating n.sup.+ polysilicon in trenches separating said pillars. The array is suitable for GBit DRAM applications because the deep trench capacitors do not increase array area. The array may have an open bitline architecture, where the plate region is common to all the storage nodes or a folded architecture with two wordlines that pass through each cell having stacked transistors, where one wordline is active and the other is passing for each cell.
Abstract:
A memory cell is provided that includes a transistor and a capacitor. The transistor has a gate, a drain, a source, and a back-plane gate, and the capacitor has first and second electrodes. The back-plane gate of the transistor is connected to the first electrode of the capacitor. In a preferred embodiment, the source of the transistor is also connected to the first electrode of the capacitor. Additionally, a memory cell is provided that includes a transistor and a capacitor. The transistor has a gate, a drain, a source, and a back-plane gate, and the capacitor has first and second electrodes. The first electrode of the capacitor is connected to the source of the transistor, and the back-plane gate changes the threshold voltage of the transistor in correspondence to charge stored on the capacitor. In one preferred embodiment, the back-plane gate is charged from the transistor by a tunneling process.
Abstract:
A memory device and memory incorporating a plurality of the memory devices is described wherein each memory device has spaced apart source and drain regions, a channel, a barrier insulating layer, a nanocrystal or a plurality of nanocrystals, a control barrier layer, and a gate electrode. The nanocrystal which may be a quantum dot, stores one electron or hole or a discrete number of electrons or holes at room temperature to provide threshold voltage shifts in excess of the thermal voltage for each change in an electron or a hole stored. The invention utilizes Coulomb blockade in electrostatically coupling one or more stored electrons or holes to a channel while avoiding in-path Coulomb-blockade controlled conduction for sensing the stored charge.
Abstract:
An edge emitting laser combines many of the desirable attributes of the common forms of surface-emitting and edge-emitting laser structures together with elimination of their drawbacks. The laser cavity of a device according to the present invention is short (on the order of the wavelength of light in the cavity medium) and current is injected into the optical cavity substantially perpendicular to the plane of emitted light and parallel to the plane of reflective mirrors. The use of a short optical cavity permits single mode laser operation because of broad mode to mode spacing and large changes in reflectivity between wavelengths. Injecting current into the cavity perpendicular to the direction of light emission provides low power operation because the resistance associated with the injected current is low. The resistance is low because current does not cross boundaries between the different material layers forming the reflective mirrors and the optical cavity. A groove in the semiconductor substrate is formed which aligns an optical fiber to one edge of the laser device. The formation of an optical device incorporating this laser structure is inexpensive to manufacture because the laser is based on planar semiconductor fabrication techniques and the optical alignment of an optical fiber to the laser has been defined by the groove adjacent the laser device.