  In this paper we investigate warm electron injection in a double gate SONOS
memory by means of 2D full-band Monte Carlo simulations of the Boltzmann
Transport Equation (BTE). Electrons are accelerated in the channel by a
drain-to-source voltage VDS smaller than 3 V, so that programming occurs via
electrons tunneling through a potential barrier whose height has been
effectively reduced by the accumulated kinetic energy. Particle energy
distribution at the semiconductor/oxide interface is studied for different bias
conditions and different positions along the channel. The gate current is
calculated with a continuum-based post-processing method as a function of the
particle distribution obtained from Monte Carlo. Simulation results show that
the gate current increases by several orders of magnitude with increasing drain
bias and warm electron injection can be an interesting option for programming
when short channel effects prohibit the application of larger drain bias.
