Effects of crystallographic orientations on the charging time in silicon nanocrystal flash memories

The effect of crystallographic orientations in nanocrystal silicon on the charging time of flash memory devices is investigated by using the Bardeen's transfer formalism within a Schrodinger-Poisson scheme. Besides the strong dependence on the nanocrystal shape, we found that the crystallographic orientations strongly affect the electronic structure by changing the symmetry of the wave functions and level degeneracy, which can result in variation in the charging time by one order of magnitude. (C) 2003 American Institute of Physics.