*Article* **Temperature Impacts on Endurance and Read Disturbs in Charge-Trap 3D NAND Flash Memories**

**Fei Chen 1,†, Bo Chen 1,†, Hongzhe Lin 1, Yachen Kong 1, Xin Liu 1, Xuepeng Zhan 1,2 and Jiezhi Chen 1,\***


**Abstract:** Temperature effects should be well considered when designing flash-based memory systems, because they are a fundamental factor that affect both the performance and the reliability of NAND flash memories. In this work, aiming to comprehensively understanding the temperature effects on 3D NAND flash memory, triple-level-cell (TLC) mode charge-trap (CT) 3D NAND flash memory chips were characterized systematically in a wide temperature range (−30~70 ◦C), by focusing on the raw bit error rate (RBER) degradation during program/erase (P/E) cycling (endurance) and frequent reading (read disturb). It was observed that (1) the program time showed strong dependences on the temperature and P/E cycles, which could be well fitted by the proposed temperature-dependent cycling program time (TCPT) model; (2) RBER could be suppressed at higher temperatures, while its degradation weakly depended on the temperature, indicating that high-temperature operations would not accelerate the memory cells' degradation; (3) read disturbs were much more serious at low temperatures, while it helped to recover a part of RBER at high temperatures.

**Keywords:** 3D NAND flash memory; temperature; endurance; read disturb
