Impact of Technology Scaling on the Heavy-Ion Upset Cross Section of Multi-Level Floating Gate Cells

The corruption of the information stored in floating gate cells due to heavy-ion strikes is a critical issue for the use of Flash memories in space. In this work we examine how feature size scaling affects the single event upset sensitivity of multi-level floating gate cells with NAND architecture. Both experimental data on heavy-ion irradiation and analytical modeling are used to study how the threshold LET and saturation cross section depend on the cell feature size. A comparison is also carried out between multi-level and single-level floating gate cells.