National Semiconductor Corporation

Intel Corporation

Mark S Ebel

Ury Priel

Giora Yaron

Ying K Shum

Jayasimha S Prasad

John Gionis

William M Regitz

A means for testing the threshold voltage changes in a programmable and erasable floating gate memory cell by accessing directly and exclusively the cells in the core, and the amplifiers that sense the operation of the cells, so as to measure the relative currents therein as an indication of threshold voltage parameters.

Memory core testing system

An electrically programmable and eraseable memory cell in which charge carriers are tunnelled between a floating gate and a drain region in the substrate through a thin oxide tunnel region, the borders of said tunnel region being confined to a small area well inside the borders of both the drain region and the floating gate. Dual paths are utilized to connect the tunnel region of the gate to the memory cell region of the gate.

Electrically programmable and erasable memory cell

A programming pulse generating circuit, suitable for use on an electrically alterable read-only semiconductor memory, that decouples from the high voltage supply when in a standby condition so as to not draw current from the supply. Alternative voltage supply connections are effected by depletion mode devices.

Semiconductor memory core programming circuit

A circuit for clearing selected bytes in a semiconductor electrically alterable memory in which the ground lines for any one column of bytes is isolatable from the ground lines for other columns, all the outputs for the bytes are urged toward a non-clearing condition, and the outputs for only the selected byte are used to introduce a clearing signal that dominates the non-clearing condition.

Semiconductor memory byte clear circuit

A circuit to restrain the rise time of a programming pulse generated in an electrically alterable read-only semiconductor memory in which excessively sudden changes in the pulse are capacitively coupled, through active devices that can be built on the chip, to a grounding switch device so as to periodically drain away the control signal used to create the pulse.

Semiconductor memory core program control circuit

A metal-oxide-silicon (MOS), random-access memory (RAM) which is emitter-coupled logic (ECL) compatible and which does not require any high level clock inputs. The memory utilizes pseudo-static cells which are refreshed with an asynchronous charge-pump signal generated on the memory chip. Buffers utilize the ECL reference signal to assure ECL compatibility. The memory employs dynamic decoding in two separate levels of decoding.

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Santa Clara, CA, United States of America

Mark S Ebel