3D NAND enables continuous NAND density and cost scaling beyond conventional 2D NAND. However, its poly-Si channel suffers from low mobility, large device variations, and instability caused by grain boundaries. Here, we overcome these drawbacks by introducing an amorphous indium-gallium-zinc-oxide (a-IGZO) channel, which has the advantages of ultra-low OFF current, back-end-of-line compatibility, higher mobility and better uniformity than poly-Si, and free of grain boundaries due to the amorphous nature. Ultra-scaled floating-gate (FG) transistors with a channel length of 60 nm are reported, achieving the highest ON current of 127 uA/um among all reported a-IGZO-based flash devices for high-density, low-power, and high-performance 3D NAND applications. Furthermore, a non-volatile and area-efficient ternary content-addressable memory (TCAM) with only two a-IGZO FG transistors is experimentally demonstrated. Array-level simulations using experimentally calibrated models show that this design achieves at least 240x array-size scalability and 2.7-fold reduction in search energy than 16T-CMOS, 2T2R, and 2FeFET TCAMs.
@article{arxiv.2112.07992,
title = {Computational Associative Memory with Amorphous InGaZnO Channel 3D NAND-Compatible FG Transistors},
author = {Chen Sun and Chao Li and Subhranu Samanta and Kaizhen Han and Zijie Zheng and Jishen Zhang and Qiwen Kong and Haiwen Xu and Zuopu Zhou and Yue Chen and Cheng Zhuo and Kai Ni and Xunzhao Yin and Xiao Gong},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2112.07992},
year = {2022}
}