ELE Times December 2016 Electronics News in India | Online Electronics Mag | Page 49

Technology

What You May Not Know About

Embedded Flash

Growth and innovation in the automotive industry has been fueling growth in the semiconductor
industry for years. The automotive semiconductor market has surpassed $30B in annual revenue and
continues to climb with the addition of ADAS and the push for fuel efficiency and added convenience. The
value of semiconductor content in each of today’s luxury carsis about $1000 USD and about $350 USD in a
mid-range car, and automotive MCUs are a significant portion of that. Most of the automotive MCUs have
on-chip embedded flash which contains a complex and exhaustive instruction code. Despite the fact that
floating-poly based embedded flash is deployed widely across a series of products across automotive,
industrial and consumer applications, and it is paragon of non-volatile memory technologies, there are
several false perceptions of embedded flash technologies which I will try to correct.

Vipin Tiwari, Director Marketing, Silicon Storage Technology, Inc.

An Embedded Flash Solution
Could Save Time and Money
Most of the time, you get what you pay
for. On the surface, it seems like a floatingpoly embedded Flash solution is more
expensive compared to a charge-trap
based solution (such as SONOS) because a
floating-poly embedded flash typically
requires more masking steps compared to
a charge-trap based embedded nonvolatile memory solution. However, chipdesigners should carefully consider the
total cost of the non-volatile solution

including potential yield loss, distress due
to field-returns, long-term data-retention,
total chip area including the ECC and
redundant circuits requiredand time-toproduction. In addition a charge-trap
based solution is not suitable for high
temperature and high endurance
applications, so if a non-volatile memory
platform needs to meet the need for a
series of low-end and high-end
applications, it is more desirable to have
anon-volatile memory solution that can fit
the need for all application on a wide
range of voltage, operating temperature,

ELE Times | 49 | December, 2016

data retention and endurance. Having
multiple non-volatile platforms for one
technology node is significantly more
expensive than having a reliable floatingpoly based non-volatile memory solution.

Not All Floating-Poly Embedded
Flash Memories Are Created
Equal
For many years, the majority of the IDMs
were using a similar 1T floating-poly
stacked gate solution for applications
requiring embedded-flash. Over the last
two decades the innovative split-gate