Stability study of non-volatile memory content under different temperature conditions

Non-Volatile Memory (NVM) devices store data in floating gates in binary form with electrical charges. Continuous improvement of device technology has led to a reduction in size of the transistors over the years. In this report, experiments were carried out to determine the temperature at which the stored electrical charges attain sufficient energy to tunnel through gate oxide, those losing the stored information. Indirect measurement, via a programmer, and direct measurement, via scanning capacitance microscopy (SCM), were adopted as a two-step approach for the experiment to provide confirmation of the charge existence. The application has been demonstrated on an 8-bit microcontroller with 16 kilobyte in-system programming (ISP) flash memory and 512 bytes electrically erasable programmable read-only memory (EEPROM).Bachelor of Engineering (Materials Engineering