Dielectric based antifuse for logic and memory ICs

The authors describe a programmable low-impedance circuit element (PLICE), which is a dielectric-based antifuse for use in both logic and memory ICs. The antifuse element offers significant size and performance improvement compared to other programmable cells. A simple thermal model has been developed to predict the antifuse resistance. Each antifuse occupies an area of 1.5- mu m/sup 2/ using 1.2- mu m technology. It can be programmed within 1 ms and has a tight resistance distribution centered around 500 Omega . The reliability of both the programmed and unprogrammed states is demonstrated to be better than 40 years. The antifuse was used in the design of the first family of desktop-configurable channeled gate arrays and a 64 K PROM (programmable read-only memory) device.<
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