Scaling trends of neutron effects in MLC NAND Flash memories

We investigate atmospheric neutron effects on floating gate cells in MLC NAND Flash memories. Loss of information is shown to occur especially at the highest program levels, but to an extent that does not challenge current error correction capabilities. We discuss the physical mechanisms and analyze scaling trends, which show a rapid increase in sensitivity for decreasing feature size. A large spread in the cross section is visible from vendor to vendor for comparable feature size. © 2010 IEEE.