Y. Oowaki et al., NEW ALPHA-PARTICLE INDUCED SOFT ERROR MECHANISM IN A 3-DIMENSIONAL CAPACITOR CELL, IEICE transactions on electronics, E78C(7), 1995, pp. 845-851
This paper describes the new alpha-particle induced soft error mechani
sm, the Minority Carrier Outflow (MCO) effect, which may seriously aff
ect the reliability of the scaled DRAMs with three dimensional capacit
ors. The MCO charge increases as the device size miniaturizes because
of the three dimensional capacitor effect as below. As the device scal
es down, the storage node volume decreases which results in the higher
minority carrier density in the storage node and larger outflow charg
e. Also as the device plan view miniaturizes, the stack capacitor heig
ht or trench depth does not scales down or even increases to keep the
storage node capacitance, therefore the initially generated minority c
arrier becomes larger. A simple analytical MCO model is introduced to
evaluate the MCO effect quantitatively. The model agrees well with the
three dimensional device simulation. The MCO model predicts that the
life time of the minority carrier in the storage node strongly affects
the MCO charge, however, even when the life time is as small as the o
rder of 100 ps, the MCO effect can be the major soft error mechanism.