A 56-nm CMOS 99-mm2 8-Gb multi-level NAND flash memory with 10-MB/s program throughput

A single 3.3-V only, 8-Gb NAND flash memory with the smallest chip to date, 98.8 mm(2), has been successfully developed. This is the world's first integrated semiconductor chip fabricated with 56-nm CMOS technologies. The effective cell size including the select transistors is 0.0075 mu m(2) per bit, which is the smallest ever reported. To decrease the chip size, a very efficient floor plan with one-sided row decoder, one-sided page buffer, and one-sided pad is introduced. As a result, an excellent 70% cell area efficiency is realized. The program throughput is drastically improved to twice as large as previously reported and comparable to binary memories. The best ever 10-MB/s programming is realized by increasing the page size from 4 kB to 8 kB: In addition, noise cancellation circuits and the dual VDD-line scheme realize both a small die size and a fast programming. An external page copy achieves a fast 93-ms block copy, efficiently using a 1-MB block size.