SILICON OPTICAL NANO CRYSTAL Paper Presentation And Seminar Topic

Silicon nanocrystal based nonvolatile memory devices1 are now in advanced development and are expected to enter commercial production in the near future.2 In these all electrical memory devices, the conventional polysilicon floating gate is replaced by a dense array of silicon nanocrystals embedded in the gate oxide. Performance benefits expected from this change in the floating gate structure include improved retention times and improved radiation hardness due to decreased sensitivity to localized oxide leakage paths as well as improved prospects for CMOS integration due to reduced device aspect ratios. As we describe in this letter, a silicon nanocrystal floating gate additionally allows for the design of optically addressed memory devices that take advantage of the luminescence emission characteristics of silicon quantum dots3–8 for data storage and retrieval.