Dynamic healing of non-volatile memory cells

摘要

Methods and systems are disclosed for dynamic healing of non-volatile memory (NVM) cells within NVM systems. The dynamic healing embodiments described herein relax damage within tunnel dielectric layers for NVM cells that occurs over time from charges (e.g., holes and/or electrons) becoming trapped within these tunnel dielectric layers. NVM operations with respect to which dynamic healing processes can be applied include, for example, erase operations, program operations, and read operations. For example, dynamic healing can be applied where performance for the NVM system degrades beyond a selected performance level for an NVM operation, such as elevated erase/program pulse counts for erase/program operations and bit errors for read operations. A variety of healing techniques can be applied, such as drain stress processes, gate stress processes, and/or other desired healing techniques.

主权项

1. A method for dynamic healing of non-volatile memory (NVM) cells, comprising:
performing a memory operation for one or more non-volatile memory (NVM) cells within an NVM system, each NVM cell having a tunnel dielectric layer, a drain node, a source node, and at least one gate node; determining performance information related to the memory operation; and applying a healing process to the NVM cells if performance for the NVM cells has degraded beyond a selected performance level based upon the performance information; wherein the applying step comprises at least one of applying a drain stress voltage to the drain nodes for the NVM cells or applying a gate stress voltage to the gate nodes for the NVM cells; and wherein the healing process is configured to heal damage to the tunnel dielectric layers within the NVM cells.