The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Mar. 25, 2003
Filed:
Aug. 02, 2001
Hung-Cheng Sung, Hsin-chu, TW;
Di-Son Kuo, Hsinchu, TW;
Chuang-Ke Yeh, Hsin Chu, TW;
Chia-Ta Hsieh, Tainan, TW;
Yai-Fen Lin, Taichung, TW;
Wen-Ting Chu, Kaoshing County, TW;
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, Hsin-Chu, TW;
Abstract
A novel method of forming a first polysilicon gate tip (poly-tip) for enhanced F-N tunneling in split-gate flash memory cells is disclosed. The poly-tip is formed in the absence of using a thick polysilicon layer as the floating gate. This is made possible by forming an oxide layer over the poly-gate and oxidizing the sidewalls of the polygate. Because the starting thickness of polysilicon of the floating gate is relatively thin, the resulting gate beak, or poly-tip, is also necessarily thin and sharp. This method, therefore, circumvents the problem of oxide thinning encountered in scaling down devices of the ultra large scale integration technology and the fast programmability and erasure performance of EEPROMs is improved.