Data Remanence in Semiconductor Devices

Peter Gutmann
IBM T.J.Watson Research Center
pgut001@cs.auckland.ac.nz
Abstract
A paper published in 1996 examined the problems involved in truly deleting data from magnetic storage media and
also made a mention of the fact that similar problems affect data held in semiconductor memory. This work extends
the brief coverage of this area given in the earlier paper by providing the technical background information
necessary to understand remanence issues in semiconductor devices. Data remanence problems affect not only
obvious areas such as RAM and non-volatile memory cells but can also occur in other areas of the device through
hot-carrier effects (which change the characteristics of the semiconductors in the device), electromigration (which
physically alter the device itself), and various other effects which are examined alongside the more obvious
memory-cell remanence problems. The paper concludes with some design and device usage guidelines which can
be useful in reducing remanence effects.

1. Introduction to Semiconductor Physics

Electrons surrounding an atomic nucleus have certain well-defined energy levels. When numbers of atoms are
grouped together, the energy levels fall into certain fixed bands made up of the discrete energy levels of individual
electrons. Between the bands are empty band gaps in which no electrons are to be found. A band which is
completely empty or full of electrons cannot conduct (for an electron to move it must move to a higher discrete
energy state, but in a completely full band this can’t happen so a completely full band can conduct just as little as a
completely empty one). An electron which is partaking in conduction is said to be in the conduction band, which
lies immediately above the valence band.
At very low temperatures, the valence band for a semiconductor is full and the conduction band is empty, so that the
semiconductor behaves like an insulator. As energy is applied, electrons move across the band gap from the valence
band into the conduction band, leaving behind a hole which behaves like a positive charge carrier equal in
magnitude to that of the electron as shown in Figure 1. Both the conduction and valence bands can conduct (via
electrons or holes), producing a bipolar (two-carrier) conductor. In insulators the band gap is large enough that no
promotion of electrons can occur. Conversely, conductors have conduction and valence bands which touch or even
overlap.

Conduction
Electron band
energy Band gap
Valence
band

Figure 1: Electron behaviour in semiconductors

In order to make use of a semiconductor, we need to be able to produce material which carries current either through
electrons or through holes, but not both. This is done by introducing impurities (usually called dopants) into the
semiconductor lattice. For example adding boron (with three valence electrons) to silicon (with four valence
electrons) leaves a deficiency of one electron per added boron atom, which is the same as one hole per boron atom.
Conversely, adding phosphorus (with five valence electrons) leaves a surplus of one electron. Material doped to
conduct mostly by holes is referred to as p-type; material doped to conduct mostly by electrons is called n-type.

1
 Passivation
layer
p-type

n-type
Ohmic
contact

Figure 2: P-N junction diode

The makeup of a simple semiconductor device, the P-N junction diode, is illustrated in Figure 2. This consists of an
n-type substrate with a p-type layer implanted into it. Protecting the surface is a thermally-grown oxide layer which
serves to passivate and protect the silicon (this passivation layer is sometimes referred to as a tamperproof coating in
smart card vendor literature). The p-type layer is formed by diffusing a dopant into the substrate at high
temperatures through a hole etched into the passivation layer, or through ion-implantation.
When such a device is forward biased (a positive voltage applied to the p-type layer and a negative voltage applied
to the n-type layer), current flows through the device. When the device is reverse-biased, very little current flows (at
least until the device breakdown voltage is reached). The exact mechanism involved is fairly complex, further
details are available from any standard reference on the topic [1].

Gate
Source Drain
Passivation
n-type n-type layer
p-type substrate
Ohmic
contact

Figure 3: n-channel MOSFET

The semiconductor device used in almost all memories and in the majority of VLSI devices is the field-effect
transistor (FET), specifically the metal oxide semiconductor FET (MOSFET). The structure of an n-channel
MOSFET, a standard building block of semiconductor memories, is shown in Figure 3. When a voltage is applied
to the gate, a conducting electron inversion layer is formed underneath it, giving this particular device the name of n-
channel MOSFET. The n-type regions at the source and drain serve to supply electrons to the inversion layer during
its formation, and the inversion layer, once formed, serves to connect the source and drain. Increasing the gate
voltage increases the charge on the inversion layer and therefore the source-drain current. Enhancement-mode
devices work in this manner, depletion-mode devices conduct with no gate voltage applied and require an applied
voltage to turn them off.
Current flow in MOSFETs is dominated by electron/hole drift, and since electrons are more mobile than holes the
fastest devices can be obtained by using n-channel devices which move electrons around. Because there are certain
circuit advantages to be gained from combining n- and p-channel variants, many circuits use both in the form of
complementary MOS (CMOS). Again, more details can be found in any standard reference [2].

2. Semiconductor Memories
Having covered the basic building blocks used to create memories, we can now go into the makeup of the memory
devices themselves. In practice we distinguish between two main memory types, static RAM (SRAM) in which
information is stored by setting the state of a bistable flip-flop which remains in this state as long as power is applied
and no new data are written, and dynamic RAM (DRAM) in which information is stored by charging a capacitor
which must be refreshed periodically as the charge bleeds away (a later section will cover EEPROM-based non-

2
volatile memories). Because of their more complex circuitry, SRAMs typically only allow 25% of the density of
DRAMs, but are sometimes preferred for their faster access times and low-power operation [3].

2.1. SRAM
SRAM cells are typically made up of cross-coupled inverters using the structure shown in Figure 4. The load
devices can be polysilicon load resistors in older R-load cells, enhancement or depletion mode MOSFETs in an
NMOS cell, or PMOS MOSFETs in a CMOS cell (providing an example of the previously mentioned combination
of n-and p-channel MOSFET parts in a circuit). The purpose of the load devices is to offset the charge leakage at
the drains of the data storage and cell selection MOSFETs. When the load is implemented with PMOS MOSFETs,
the resulting CMOS cell has virtually no current flowing through it except during switching, leading to a very low
power consumption.

+V

Load
L L
devices

Data Data

Select Select

Figure 4: SRAM memory cell

Operation of the cell is very simple: When the cell is selected, the value written via Data/ Data is stored in the cross-
coupled flip-flops. The cells are arranged in an n  m matrix, with each cell individually addressable. Most SRAMs
select an entire row of cells at a time, and read out the contents of all the cells in the row along the column lines.

2.2. DRAM
DRAM cells are made up of some device performing the function of a capacitor and transistors which are used to
read/write/refresh the charge in the capacitors. Early designs used three-transistor (3T) cells, newer ones use a one-
transistor (1T) cell as shown in Figure 5. Data is stored in the cell by setting the data line to a high or low voltage
level when the select line is activated. Compare the simplicity of this circuit to the six-transistor SRAM cell!

Select

Storage
capacitor
Data

Figure 5: DRAM memory cell

The tricky parts of a DRAM cell lie in the design of the circuitry to read out the stored value and the design of the
capacitor to maximise the stored charge/minimise the storage capacitor size. Stored values in DRAM cells are read
out using sense amplifiers, which are extremely sensitive comparators which compare the value stored in the DRAM
cell with that of a reference cell. The reference cell used is a dummy cell which stores a voltage halfway between
the two voltage levels used in the memory cell (experimental multilevel cells use slightly different technology which

3
won’t be considered here). Later improvements in sense amplifiers reduced sensitivity to noise and compensated for
differences in threshold voltages among devices.

3. DRAM Cell Structure

As has already been mentioned, the second tricky part of DRAM cell design is the design of the cell’s storage
capacitor. This typically consists of the underlying semiconductor serving as one plate, separated from the other
polysilicon plate by a thin oxide film. This fairly straightforward two-dimensional cell capacitor was used in planar
DRAM cells covering the range from 16 kb to 1 Mb cells, and placed the capacitor next to the transistor, occupying
about a third of the total cell area. Although some gains in capacitance (leading to a shrinking of cell area) could be
made by thinning the oxide thickness separating the capacitor plates, for newer cells it was necessary to move from
the 2D plate capacitor structure to 3D structures such as trench and stacked capacitors. The conventional storage
time (meaning the time during which the cell contents can be recovered without access to specialised equipment,
typically 2-4 seconds [4]) for the memory cell is based on storage capacity and therefore the physical dimensions of
the capacitor [5], so that DRAM designers have used various ingenious tricks to keep the capacitor storage constant
while continuously shrinking cell dimensions.
Most of the earlier 4 Mb cells used trench capacitors, which had the advantage that capacitance could be increased
by deepening the trench, which didn’t use up any extra surface area. Newer generations of trench capacitor cells
(sometimes called inverted trench cells) placed the storage electrode inside the trench, which reduced various
problems encountered with the earlier cells which had the storage electrode in the substrate. There are a large
number of variations possible with this cell, all of them based around the best way to implement the trench
capacitor, with some relevant examples shown in Figure 6. The final evolution of the trench cell stacked the
transistor above the capacitor, reducing the total area still further at the cost of increasing the number of steps
required in the manufacturing process.

Select

Data Data Data

Figure 6: DRAM cells: Trench (left), inverted trench (middle), stacked (right)
Newer DRAM cells of 16 Mb and higher capacity moved from a menagerie of trench capacitor types to stacked
capacitor cells (STCs), which stack the storage capacitor above the transistor rather than burying it in the silicon
underneath. STCs used varying types of horizontal or vertical fins to further increase the surface area, and thus the
capacitance. The cell at the right of Figure 6 employs a double-stacked STC. Another alternative to fins is spread-
stacking, in which capacitors for different cells are layered over one another. As with trench capacitors, many
further capacitor design variants exist [6][7].

4. Factors Influencing RAM Cell and General Device Operation

Now that we’ve covered the makeup of the various memory cell types, we can look at what makes it possible to
analyse and recover data from these cells and from semiconductor devices in general long after it should (in theory)
have vanished. To see how this is possible, we need to go back to the level of semiconductor device physics. Recall
the discussion of (theoretical) electron/hole flow, in which electrons or holes move freely through a semiconductor
lattice. In practice it isn’t nearly this simple, since the lattice will contain impurities, atoms missing from the lattice
(vacancies), and extra atoms in the lattice (interstitials). In addition, the atoms in the lattice will be vibrating
slightly, producing phonons which work like electrons but carry momentum and can affect electrons if they collide
with them.
If perchance these various impediments to free hole/electron movement don’t take effect, or because of other factors
such as high temperatures or voltages, electrons can build up quite a bit of momentum, which can be transferred to
atoms in the lattice during collisions. In some cases this is enough to physically move the atom to new locations, a
process known as electromigration.

4
4.1. Electromigration
Electromigration involves the relocation of metal atoms due to high current densities, a phenomenon in which atoms
are carried along by an “electron wind” in the opposite direction to the conventional current flow, producing voids at
the negative electrode and hillocks and whiskers at the positive electrode (if there’s a passivation layer present the
excess matter extrudes out to form a whisker, if not it distributes itself to minimise total surface area and forms a
hillock). Void formation leads to a local increase in current density and Joule heating (the interaction of electrons
and metal ions to produce thermal energy), producing further electromigration effects. When the external stress is
removed, the disturbed system tends to relax back to its original equilibrium state, resulting in a backflow which
heals some of the electromigration damage. In the long term though this can cause device failure (the excavated
voids lead to open circuits, the grown whiskers to short circuits), but in less extreme cases simply serves to alter a
device’s operating characteristics in noticeable ways. For example the excavations of voids leads to increased
wiring resistance, and the growth of whiskers leads to contact formation and current leakage. An example of a
conductor which exhibits whisker growth due to electromigration is shown in Figure 7, and one which exhibits void
formation (in this case severe enough to have lead to complete failure) is shown in Figure 8. Electromigration is a
complex topic, an excellent introduction to the subject is contained in the overview paper by Lloyd [8].

Figure 7: Whisker growth on a conductor due to electromigration

In order to reduce electromigration effects which occur in pure metals, interconnects are typically alloys (a few
percent copper in aluminium interconnects, a few percent tin in copper interconnects) which have electromigration
characteristics of their own in that the Cu or Sn solute atoms are displaced by the electron wind until the source
region becomes depleted and behaves like the original pure metal. This initial level of electromigration effect,
which doesn’t affect circuit operation and isn’t directly visible, can be detected using electron microprobe
techniques which measure the distribution of the Cu or Sn along the base metal line [9].

5
 Figure 8: Void formation in a conductor due to electromigration
Although recent trends in clock speeds and device feature size reduction are resulting in devices with characteristics
such as thin, sub-1.0μm lines, short sub-50-100μm line lengths, and utilisation of high frequencies which have
traditionally been regarded as electromigration-resistant [10][11], they merely provide an ameliorative effect which
is balanced by other (in some cases yet-to-be-understood) electromigration phenomena which occur as device
dimensions shrink. Even the move to copper interconnects is no panacea, since although the actual copper
electromigration mechanisms differ somewhat from those in aluminium, the problem still occurs [9][12][13].

4.2. Hot Carriers

High-energy electrons can cause other problems as well. A very obvious one is that the device heats up during
operation because of collisions with the atoms in the lattice, at least one effect of the heating being the generation of
further high-speed electrons. A problem which is particularly acute in MOSFETs with very small device
dimensions is that of hot carriers which are accelerated to a high energy due to the large electric fields which occur
as device dimensions are reduced (hot-carrier effects in newer high-density DRAMs have become so problematic
that the devices contain internal voltage converters to reduce the external 3.3 or 5V supply by one or two volts to
help combat this problem, and the most recent ones use a supply voltage of 2.5V for similar reasons). In extreme
cases these hot electrons can overcome the Si-SiO2 potential barrier and be accelerated into the gate oxide and stay
there as excess charge [14]. The detrapping time for the resulting trapped charge can range from nanoseconds to
days [15], although if the charge makes it into the silicon nitride passivation layer it’s effectively there permanently
(one study estimated a lifetime in excess of 30 years at 150°C) [16].
This excess charge changes the characteristics of the device over time, reducing the on-state current in n-MOSFETs
and increasing the off-state current in p-MOSFETs [17][18][19]. The change in characteristics produces a variety of
measurable effects, for example one study found a change of several hundred millivolts in memory cell signal
voltage over a period of a few minutes [20]. This effect is most marked when a 1 bit is written after a 0 bit has been
repeatedly read or written from the cell, leading to a drop in the cell threshold voltage. Writing a 0 over a 1 leads to
an increase in the cell voltage. One way to detect these voltage shifts is to adjust the settings of the reference cell in
the sense amplifier so that instead of being set to a median value appropriate for determining whether a stored value
represents a 0 or a 1, it can be used to obtain a precise measurement of the actual voltage from the cell.

6
Hot-carrier stressing of cells can also affect other cell parameters such as the cell’s access and refresh times. For
example the precharge time (the time in which it takes to set the DRAM data lines to their preset values before an
access) is increased by hot-carrier degradation, although the specific case of precharge time change affects only
older NMOS cells and not newer CMOS ones. In addition hot carriers can produce visible or near-infrared photon
emission in saturated FETs [21][22], but use of this phenomenon would require that an attacker be physically
present while the device is being operated.
Hot carrier effects occur in logic circuits in general and not just in RAM cells. When MOS transistors are employed
in digital logic, the logic steady states are regions of low stress because there is either a high field near the drain but
the gate is low and the channel is off, or the electric field near the drain is low, in both cases leading to no generation
of hot carriers. Hot carriers are generated almost exclusively during switching transitions [23][24]. The effects of
the hot-carrier stressing can be determined by measuring a variety of device parameters, including assorted currents,
voltages, and capacitances for the device [25].

4.3. Ionic Contamination

The most common ionic contamination present in semiconductors arises from the sodium (and to a lesser extent
potassium) ions present in materials used during the semiconductor manufacturing and packaging process, a typical
ion count being 1010/cm2. This contamination was originally thought to arise from sodium diffusion from the
furnace tube [26] but with current manufacturing processes comes about because of impurities in the metallisation
layers contaminating the silicon beneath. The problem is generally addressed through the standard application of
passivation layers to protect the silicon [27]. Sodium ions have a fairly high mobility in silicon dioxide, and in the
presence of an electric field or elevated temperatures will migrate towards the silicon/silicon dioxide interface in the
device, reducing the threshold voltage of n-channel devices and increasing it for p-channel devices [28], again
producing results which are detectable using the techniques described for hot-carrier effect detection.
There has been almost no work done in this area, probably because it isn’t a significant enough problem to affect
normal device operation, although one of the few works in this area indicate that it would take many minutes to
hours of stress at standard operating temperatures (50-100°C) to produce any noticeable effect [26]. In addition it’s
unlikely that the effects of sodium contamination in current devices will be useful in recovering data from them,
since reliability studies of devices indicate that contamination occurs only in randomly-distributed locations where
impurities have penetrated the passivation layer through microfractures or pinholes [29]. Finally, the combination of
improved manufacturing and passivation processes and shrinking device dimensions (which reduce the effects of
mobile ions on the device) render this an area which is unlikely to bear much fruit.
Halide ions are another type of contaminant which may be introduced during the manufacturing process (in some
cases deliberately as a semiconductor dopant), however these only lead to general corrosion of the device rather than
producing any effects useful for recovering data from it (yet another reason why passivation layers are used is to
provide some level of protection against this type of contamination and its attendant side-effects).

4.4. Other Effects

The storage capacitor in a DRAM cell typically needs to store 250-300 fC of charge. As has already been
mentioned, earlier planar cells were scaled down by reducing the oxide thickness in the planar capacitor, while
newer cells have gone to 3D structures such as trench and stacked capacitors. Trench capacitors typically used
silicon dioxide (often referred to as ONO) insulators, while STCs have gone to using silicon nitride films which
have a higher dielectric constant and allow thinner films to be used (as usual, a variety of other exotic technologies
are also in use). In both cases parameters such as leakage current and time-dependant dielectric breakdown (TDDB)
are relatively static and can’t be used for stored data recovery purposes.
Radiation can also affect the operation of a RAM cell, for example radiation-induced charging of a MOSFET’s gate
oxide can alter the turn-on voltage of the device, with the oxide-trapped charge shifting the required turn-on voltage
at the gate downwards for an n-channel MOSFET, effectively making it easier to turn on. p-channel MOSFETs,
because of their slightly different mode of operation, are more resistant to radiation, but when affected become more
difficult to turn off. Radiation can therefore alter memory cell parameters such as voltage level thresholds, timings,
and power supply and leakage currents. As with DRAM capacitor effects this provides little practical help with
stored data recovery, although it can be used to modify the operation of circuits for active attacks — as the radiation
level increases it leads to losses in switching speed, a so-called “logic failure” in which a change in logic state
becomes impossible. One way to utilise this in an attack would be to irradiate a cell until any erase-on-tamper

7
functionality is rendered unusable, which is why high-end tamper-responsive crypto devices include sensors to
detect the presence of ionising radiation [30].
A final problem area which is familiar to anyone who has examined the problems of erasing data stored on magnetic
media is the fact that some of the more sophisticated memory designs include facilities to map out failing or failed
cells in the same way that hard drives will map out bad sectors. This is performed using spare row/column line
substitution (SLS), which substitutes problem cells with spare, redundant ones [31]. This technology is fairly rare
and is usually applied only to correct initial hard failures so it isn’t really a major concern, however it does become a
problem in EEPROM/flash storage which is examined in Section 6.

4.5. Methods for Determining Changes in Device Operation

The techniques covered in the literature for determining changes in device operation are many and varied, which is
both a blessing because there are so many to choose from and a curse because no two authors can agree on which
criteria to use to determine a change in a device’s operation, although there is general agreement that a device’s
characteristics have been altered once it has experienced a 100 mV shift in the device threshold voltage or a 10%
change in transconductance, voltage, or current (depending on the author’s preferences). Similarly, published
results on phenomena such as hot-carrier effects are often obtained with specially-constructed test structures (ring
oscillators are popular) which may not apply to other circuits such as memory cells. Because of the wide variation
in experimental methods and sources reported in the literature and the equally large variety of devices in use it’s not
possible to provide definitive information on how the data recovery process might proceed, this section will attempt
to cover some of the more common methods used for determining changes in device operation but is by no means
exhaustive.
In the most extreme cases it may be possible to recover data directly from the device without resorting to any special
techniques. “Burn-in” of data which had been stored in SRAM over long periods of time was common in 1980’s
devices, in one reported case DES master keys stored in a hardware security module used for PIN-processing were
recovered almost intact on power-up, with recoverability of the remaining bits being aided by the presence of the
DES key parity bits [32].
More recent SRAM devices are less likely to exhibit this problem to such a degree, requiring the use of more
sophisticated readout methods. One widely-used technique from the field of device testing involves examining the
amount of power supply current being supplied to the device, known as IDDQ testing. The testing methodology
involves executing a set of test vectors until a given location is reached (know as a parametric measurement
stopping place or PM stop), at which point the device is halted and the current measured. In the quiescent state, n-
and p-channel MOSFETS are either on or off, so there should be no current flowing, and PM stops are selected to
coincide with this. Devices which aren’t functioning normally will exhibit abnormal IDDQ characteristics which can
be measured once the PM stop is reached. By varying parameters such as the applied voltage and operating
temperature, it’s possible to identify devices which have been subject to effects such as hot-carrier stressing which
have altered their operational parameters. Floating-gate designs may also have time-dependant IDDQ characteristics
in which the floating gate causes both n- and p-channel MOSFETS to be partially on and therefore conducting, a
current flow which slowly ceases as the floating gate charges to a logic state and the current subsides. Again, the
initial charge (or lack thereof) on the gate and the change in charge can be observed by observing the IDDQ [33][34].
Many alternative techniques, arising from the field of semiconductor reliability analysis, also exist [35]. For
example measuring the substrate current, the gate current, and the current in the gated drain-substrate diode of a
MOSFET can all be used to determine the amount of stressing which has taken place [36][37]. These measurements
can be used to determine the level and duration of stress applied [38].
Access to internal portions of a device can be obtained in many ways [39]. Most current ICs employ design for test
(DFT) methodologies which break the device up into more manageable blocks of circuitry and provide test access to
each block. Other techniques such as bond pad probing can also be used to obtain access to portions of a device.
When it becomes necessary to go beyond the access points provided by the manufacturer, things get a bit more
tricky. Traditionally, access to internal portions of IC circuitry has been performed with mechanical probing
techniques using tungsten wire etched down to a tip radius of 0.1–0.2 μm. These probes provide gigahertz
bandwidths with an effective loading capacitance as low as 100 fF and a load resistance of 1 MΩ or more.
The recent use of deep submicron designs has complicated mechanical probing, since the optical diffraction limit
and small depth of focus of the optical microscopes used to position the probes has made it difficult to see and probe

8
the deep submicron lines. In addition standard mechanical probing isn’t able to access buried lines in devices with
multiple metallisation layers. Both of these limits can be overcome through the use of focused ion beam (FIB)
workstations, which can be used both to expose buried conductors and to deposit new, easily-accessible probe points
on an existing device [40] (this technique was used by the Canadian reverse-engineering lab Chipworks to rebuild an
ATMEL EEPROM from a crashed aircraft in order to recover data from it [41][42]). The top metal layers are
typically broad power buses, so no serious harm is caused by FIB milling of small holes to access lower-layer
conductors. The only potential problem is that the FIB process can cause local charging of the device surface, which
is usually avoided by grounding all pins in the device and shielding surrounding areas with conducting tape,
however the FIB-induced charging can still affect floating gates so it’s a good idea to avoid performing FIB surgery
in their general vicinity [43]. In addition some technologies such as trench and STC DRAM cells are naturally
resistant to being accessed in this manner, although it’s still possible to get to transistors indirectly connected with
the cell, for example the ones in the sense amplifiers.

5. Minimising RAM Data Recoverability

The previous sections have shown a variety of ways in which stored data can leave traces of its existence behind.
These include the effects of electrical stress on ionic contaminants and hot-carrier effects (which can be used to
recover overwritten data or data from memory to which power has been removed), and electromigration effects
(which can be used to determine, after indefinite time periods, which type of signal was most commonly carried by a
particular part of a circuit). The latter would prove useful in recovering information such as the bit patterns of keys
stored in special-purpose cryptographic devices — since the physical device is modified the bits can be recovered an
arbitrary amount of time later even if the memory cells they were stored in have been successfully erased and
trapped charges have bled away.
The solution to the first problem is to ensure that sensitive data is stored for as short a time as possible; the solution
to the second problem is more difficult but in general involves ensuring that a multitude of signals are sent through
circuits without any one signal predominating. These approaches are explained in more detail in the following two
sections.

5.1. Avoiding Short-term Retention Effects

The best way to avoid short-term retention effects is to ensure that no memory cell holds a data value for more than
a certain amount of time. Based on the figures given earlier, a few minutes of storage of a given value should be
treated as an upper bound; storage for any larger amount of time will cause detectable effects in the memory cell,
although it may take quite a while longer before these effects really become a problem. In a series of tests carried
out on a sample of SRAM devices, changes in device threshold voltage, transconductance, and drain-source current
were observed after 100–500 seconds of stress, leading to a corresponding change in SRAM access time and
operating voltage [44]. As the SRAM cell in Figure 4 indicates, reads and writes of 0 and 1 bits stress different
access transistors in the cell so that it’s possible to determine whether a 0 or 1 was stored there by determining
which transistor was stressed the most (the grey dots in the figure indicate the main stress locations). The change in
cell behaviour can be determined by recording the cell access time, through voltage microprobing of the cell’s
transistors, or using some of the other techniques mentioned earlier. Similar tests have been performed on DRAMs,
although in this case the emphasis was on stress effects on shared circuitry such as address buffers and sense
amplifiers. While there were quite noticeable effects in all of these areas the study didn’t examine the effect on
individual storage cells [45].
If nothing is done, the device will eventually recover by itself, although this can take quite some time at normal
room temperatures. One way to accelerate the recovery process is to expose the device to elevated temperatures, the
read access times for the SRAM devices mentioned previously were found to recover after around 1 ½ hours at
75°C, 3 days at 50°C, nearly two months at 20°C, and approximately 3 years at 0°C. No recovery was observed for
write access times, but given that determining this would involve writing to the cells of interest it’s unlikely that this
presents much of a threat.
The best practical way to avoid long-term storage effects is to periodically flip the stored bits as suggested in the
1996 paper [46] so that each cell never holds a value long enough for it to be “remembered”. Although impractical
for large amounts of data, this may be feasible for small amounts of sensitive data such as cryptovariables. For
example consider an encryption key whose bits are flipped once a minute. The key flip state is held in keyState,

9
initially set to 0, and access is protected though a mutex keyMutex. The code to flip and use the bits is shown in
Figure 9.
while( TRUE )
{ acquire keyMutex;
acquire keyMutex; if( keyState == 1 )
key ^= 1111…1111; key ^= 1111…1111;
keyState ^= 1; encrypt/decrypt;
release keyMutex; if( keyState == 1 )
key ^= 1111…1111;
sleep( 60 ); release keyMutex;
}

Figure 9: Flipping (left) and using (right) in-memory cryptovariables

This can be implemented as a simple wrapper around an existing encryption function, and ensures that the same key
bits are never stored in a RAM cell for more than a certain amount of time, in this case one minute. A rather simpler
solution which doesn’t require complex bit-flipping and tracking of cryptovariable state information involves
moving the data around in memory occasionally and overwriting the original storage locations, again ensuring that
data is never stored in a RAM cell for too long.
If the luxury of custom circuitry is available (for example in a specialised crypto processor or module), it may be
possible to integrate this bit-flipping into the memory circuitry. At each DRAM refresh cycle, the complement of
the read value is written. When data is read from the cell, it is XORed with the keyState variable which tracks
the state of the data currently stored in the cells (for older 3T cells in which the output data were inverted compared
to the input data, it would have been possible to achieve this bit-flipping effect automatically by omitting the data
inversion which is normally required during a refresh cycle).
Since SRAMs don’t have a DRAM-style refresh cycle, this type of circuit modification isn’t really possible for
them, so that performing bit-flipping in an SRAM would require the addition of DRAM-style refresh circuitry,
negating most of the advantages of SRAM.
Mention should also be made of hybrid memory types which combine DRAM with a small amount of SRAM
(usually acting as some form of cache or I/O buffer) to improve the average access speed of the DRAM. A common
example of this is extended data out (EDO) DRAM, which places a D-type latch on the data line so that the next
access cycle can be started as soon as the data has entered the latches. Since these latches are shared across the
entire DRAM, there is little chance of any piece of data except the last one read before a long break in accesses to
the DRAM remaining in them for more than an instant, and if this is really a concern they can be flushed with a read
to an innocuous memory location. Synchronous DRAMs (SDRAMs), which parallel load a quantity of data into a
shift register and then shift it out one bit at a time, have similar properties.

5.2. Avoiding Long-term Retention Effects

Long-term retention effects are most likely to occur when the same data is repeatedly fed through a circuit, an
example being the repeated use of a private key in a crypto accelerator for large-integer maths. This is a
phenomenon which only occurs in specialised hardware, since general-purpose processors are fed such a variety of
data that none of it has much effect on the circuitry. In contrast a private key stored in tamper-resistant hardware
and fed repeatedly through a crypto processor will lead to some circuits always carrying the same signals, leading to
long-term hot-carrier degradation and electromigration effects.
The most common solution to this problem (and that of device protection in general), embedding the crypto device
in a tamper-resistant or tamper-sensing package which zeroises the cryptovariables when tampering is detected, is of
little help since it’s currently not possible to quickly zeroise electromigration effects, at least not without resorting to
chemical zeroisation means. One way of undoing the effects of electromigration (apart from hoping that the system
will eventually relax back to its ground state) is to apply a reverse current which reverses the electromigration stress,
effectively undoing the electromigration damage [47][48]. This technique is already used in some EEPROM/flash
devices to reduce erase stress by applying a reverse-polarity pulse after an erase pulse [49].
A somewhat more complex and difficult-to-implement approach is to have the crypto processor process dummy data
when it isn’t working with real data and keys. A downside of this is that it requires that a crypto operation be
interruptible once started (it’s no good having to wait for a dummy RSA decrypt to complete each time you want to

10
decrypt data), and leads to increased power consumption and decreased device lifetime. In addition, it assumes that
the device isn’t occupied at all times with handling real data, leaving no chance to process any dummy data.
Unfortunately alternating dummy and real data is complicated by the design of typical crypto devices. For example
encryption hardware will typically contain multiple key registers from which the currently selected key is expanded
into storage reserved for the scheduled key, which is then used to encrypt a block of data. This means that switching
keys incurs the overhead of a key schedule (although many devices, particularly DES hardware, will do an on-the-
fly key schedule which is effectively free in hardware). In addition, pipelined implementations of block ciphers are
generally not interruptible, requiring completion of processing of the current block (and in some cases several more
blocks to force the pipeline to be flushed) before a key change can take effect.
In order to economise on chip real estate (and therefore on device cost), virtually all real-world/non-research DES
hardware implementations iterate a single round 16 times, with on-the-fly key scheduling. Non-DES iterated
algorithms (as well as non-crypto algorithms such as MD5 and SHA-1) are also implemented by iterating one round
rather than by unrolling the operation. These can (with a little redesign) be interrupted at any point in the
encryption/decryption cycle and new data can be substituted. In addition the fact that a single round is reused with
multiple sets of key bits means that there’s a very mixed set of data patterns in use which minimises the effects of
any one pattern.
The crypto cores of large-integer maths accelerators (for example RSA accelerators) are less vulnerable to long-term
effects since they typically iterate a simple operation such as addition or bit shifting in a loop to achieve
multiplication, exponentiation, or whatever else is required. For example a typical RSA accelerator [50] might
consist of one of more 512- or 1024-bit adders and/or shift registers which are used to perform RSA encryption
using a series of squaring and modular multiplication steps, with a 1024-bit multiplication being performed with
1024 additions. Since the operations reuse the basic add/shift circuitry with constantly-changing bit patterns, the
problem of data retention in these parts of the circuit are greatly reduced. However, the iterated application of the
same keying data exacerbates the retention problem in other parts of the circuit, since a single modular
exponentiation can result in key components travelling over the same data paths thousands or even millions of times.
The RSA accelerator mentioned above, and others like it, perform a 1 kb modular multiplication with 1k modular
additions, and a modular exponentiation with 1k modular multiplications, for a total of 1M applications of the same
cryptovariables per RSA operation, and potentially trillions of applications per day of operation in a loaded SSL
server.

6. EEPROM Memory Cells

Flash memory and EEPROMs are closely related, with flash being simply an extension of EEPROM technology to
allow higher densities in exchange for some loss in flexibility. All EEPROM/flash memory cells work in the same
general manner and employ as storage element a MOS transistor with a floating gate into which electrons are
tunnelled using a process known as Fowler-Nordheim tunnelling, a quantum-mechanical effect in which electrons
tunnel through the energy barrier of a very thin dielectric such as silicon dioxide [51].

6.1. FLOTOX Cells

A typical older EEPROM technology is Intel’s floating-gate tunnelling oxide (FLOTOX) technology, with a typical
transistor structure shown in Figure 10. A cross-section of the device with the corresponding energy-band diagram
is shown in Figure 11. To store a charge, the control gate’s voltage is raised with the source and drain grounded, so
that electrons tunnel through to the floating gate. To remove the charge, the process is reversed and the electrons
tunnel back out. The stored charge changes the threshold of the MOS transistor which comprises the cell, typically
by 3–3.5V for a 5V cell [52]. The change in the threshold depends on a number of factors including the
programming time (the longer the time, the larger the change), temperature (the higher the temperature, the fewer
the available hot electrons available to be injected), and the condition of the cell, which is covered in more detail
further on.

11
 Floating
gate Gate

Gate Tunnel
oxide N+ N+ oxide
P-substrate

Source Drain

Figure 10: Typical EEPROM memory cell

This example of cell operation is merely representative, the details vary from manufacturer to manufacturer [53]. In
particular, some issues like dielectric scaling effects and various program and erase mechanisms aren’t fully
understood yet, leading to a variety of technologies and continual changes in those technologies. In addition the
interpretation of what represents a stored 0 or 1 varies from device to device in that cells can be written into either
state, with one state being regarded as “programmed” and the other as “erased”. In some cells the low-stored-charge
state is called programmed, in others it’s called erased.

nn e
ain ide
t
ga
ide

Dr ox
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ox

el
ati
te
te

Flo
Ga

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Gate at
+ve
eeeeeeee

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Figure 11: FLOTOX EEPROM program/erase process

6.2. ETOX Cells

A somewhat newer technology is represented by Intel’s EPROM tunnel oxide (ETOX) cell [54][55], which uses
channel hot electron (CHE) injection to store a value and Fowler-Nordheim tunnelling to remove it, is illustrated in
Figure 12. This technique is widely used in flash memory, although the widely-used NAND flash again uses
tunnelling for both programming and erasure (NAND flash cells have a somewhat specialised architecture which
allows the use of the more efficient tunnelling for program and erase [56]).

12
 +12V
Gate
Floating gate
CHE Injection
Source Drain

GND +~6V
GND
Gate
Floating gate
FN Tunneling
Source Drain

+12V

Figure 12: ETOX EEPROM program/erase process

The basic EEPROM cell consists of the storage transistor described above and a second transistor to select or
deselect the cell (some technologies employ additional error detection and correction circuitry). In an attempt to
increase storage density, manufacturers have moved towards using the select transistors to handle multiple storage
cells. When the cells are organised in this manner only the programming step can be done in a bit-by-bit basis, the
erase operation works by erasing all cells in a block and programming the new data bits as required (or rewriting the
old data in sections where no change is to occur). Because programming is possible on a bit by bit basis, it’s usual
to only program cells which are currently in the erased state to avoid overprogramming already-programmed cells
and (in the case of flash memory) to avoid having to erase an entire sector just to change one or two bytes.
The details of the erase operation again vary somewhat across different manufacturers, and unlike programming the
erase operation functions on a block of cells at a time. Since the cells aren’t all uniform, a cell array may contain
fast-erasing bits as well as typical-erase bits, so that a single erase pulse may not erase all the cells. Because of this
it’s necessary to verify the erase and reapply the erase pulse to catch the remaining cells. This operation is repeated
until all cells have been reduced to less than the cell erase verify level. In practice the erasure process is a
speculative one, with the initial pulse being far shorter than the typical erase time, followed by longer and longer
pulses as required. The reason for using this erase process is that we want to avoid further affecting already-erased
cells, once a cell is erased by a pulse any subsequent pulses don’t significantly change its threshold voltage. The
programming process is usually performed using a similar type of algorithm, with the main difference being that
programming is possible on a bit-by-bit basis so that cells which are already at the required level aren’t programmed
further [57][58].

6.3. Flash Memory Technology

The simplest flash technology, employing a NOR structure, allows access to individual cells but requires a dual-
voltage supply and has a rather low block density. More common is a NAND structure in which multiple transistors
in series are controlled by a single select transistor as shown in Figure 13. NAND EEPROM/flash moves data to
and from storage in large blocks, typically 64–256 bytes at a time, and has cells which are typically one-quarter the
size of equivalent conventional EEPROM cells. Other size optimisations include tricks such as stacking the select
transistor atop the storage transistor and similar methods for merging the function of the two transistors into a single,
smaller unit, for example including the select gate as a second gate in the cell, the sidewall select-gate or SISOS cell
[59]. Another way to improve density is to use multilevel storage, which distinguishes between multiple charge
levels in a cell instead of just the basic programmed and erased states [60][61].

13
 Bit line
Select gate (source)

Word line 1

Word line 2

Word line 3

Word line 4

Select gate (drain)

Figure 13: NAND flash memory structure

6.4. Data Remanence in EEPROM/Flash Memory

The number of write cycles possible with EEPROM technology is limited because the floating gate slowly
accumulates electrons, causing a gradual increase in the storage transistor’s threshold voltage which manifests (in its
most observable form) as increased programming time and, eventually, an inability to erase the cell. Although
EEPROM/flash cells can typically endure 1M or more write/erase cycles, the presence of slight defects in the
tunnelling oxide (leading to leakage and eventual breakdown during the tunnelling process) reduces the effective life
of the entire collection of cells to 10–100k write/erase cycles. This problem is significantly reduced in flash
memory cells, where the main failure mode appears to be negative charge trapping (that is, the trapping of holes in
the gate oxide) which inhibits further CHE injection and tunnelling, changing the write and erase times of the cell
and shifting its threshold voltage [62][63]. The amount of trapped charge can be determined by measuring the gate-
induced drain leakage (GIDL) current of the cell [64], or its effects can be observed more indirectly by measuring
the threshold voltage of the cell. In older devices which tied the reference voltage used to read the cell to the device
supply voltage it was often possible to do this (and perform other interesting tricks such as making a programmed
cell appear erased and vice versa) by varying the device supply voltage, but with newer devices it’s necessary to
change the parameters of the reference cells used in the read process, either by re-wiring portions of the cell circuitry
or by using undocumented test modes built into the device by manufacturers.
A less common failure mode which occurs with the very thin tunnel oxides used in flash memory is one where
unselected erased cells adjacent to selected cells gain charge when the selected cell is written (known as a
programming disturb) due to the gate of the unselected transistor being stressed by the voltage applied to the
common data line shared with the selected transistor. There are various subfamilies of programming disturbs
including bitline (also called drain-) and word line (also called gate-) disturbs, in which bias on the common bit or
word line causes charge to be injected from the substrate into the floating gate of an unselected cell [65][66]. This
isn’t enough to change the cell threshold sufficiently to upset a normal read operation, but should be detectable using
the specialised techniques described above. There is also a type of disturb which can occur when extensive read
cycles are performed, with this type of disturb holes are generated in the substrate via impact ionisation and injected
into the floating gate, causing a loss of charge. This appears to only affect so-called fast-programming cells [67]
(which erase and program a lot quicker than typical cells) and isn’t useful in determining the cell contents since it
requires knowledge of the cell’s pre-stress characteristics to provide a baseline to compare the post-stress
performance to.
In terms of long-term retention issues, there is a phenomenon called field-assisted electron emission in which
electrons in the floating gate migrate to the interface with the underlying oxide and from there tunnel into the
substrate, causing a net charge loss. The opposite occurs with erased cells, in which electron injection takes place
[68]. Finally, just as with DRAM cells, EEPROM/flash cells are also affected by ionic contamination since the
negatively-charged floating gate attracts positive ions which induce charge loss, although the effect is generally too
miniscule to be measurable.
The means of detecting these effects is as for RAM cells and MOSFET devices in general, for example measuring
the change in cell threshold, gate voltage, or observing other phenomena which can be used to characterise the cell’s

14
operation. The changes are particularly apparent in virgin and freshly-programmed cells, where the first set of
write/erase cycles causes a (comparatively) large shift in the cell thresholds, after which changes are much more
gradual [53][66] (as usual, this is device-dependant, for example the high injection MOS or HIMOS cell exhibits
somewhat different behaviour than FLOTOX and ETOX cells [69]). Because of this it’s possible to differentiate
between programmed-and-erased and never-programmed cells, particularly if the cells have only been programmed
and erased once, since the virgin cell characteristics will differ from the erased cell characteristics. Another
phenomenon which helps with this is overerasing, in which an erase cycle applied to an already-erased cell leaves
the floating gate positively charged, thus turning the memory transistor into a depletion-mode transistor. To avoid
this problem, some devices first program all cells before erasing them (for example Intel’s original ETOX-based
devices did this, programming the cells to 0s before erasing them to 1s [55]), although the problem is more generally
solved by redesigning the cell to avoid excessive overerasing, however even with this protection there’s still a
noticeable threshold shift when a virgin cell is programmed and erased.
EEPROM/flash memory can also have its characteristics altered through hot carriers which are generated by band-
to-band tunnelling and accelerated in the MOSFET’s depletion region, resulting in changes in the threshold voltages
of erased cells. As with other factors which affect EEPROM/flash cells, the changes are particularly apparent in
fresh cells but tend to become less noticeable after around 10 program/erase cycles [62].
Finally, as with SLS features in RAM, EEPROM/flash memory often contains built-in features which allow the
recovery of data long after it should have, in theory, been deleted. The mapping out of failing sectors which
parallels the sector sparing used in disk drives has already been mentioned, there also exist device-specific
peculiarities such as the fact that data can be recovered from the temporary buffers used in the program-without-
erase mode employed in some high-density flash memories, allowing recovery of both the new data which was
written and the original data in the sector being written to [61].
Working at a slightly higher level than the device itself are various filesystem-level wear-levelling techniques which
are used to decrease the number of erase operations which are necessary to update data, and the number of writes to
a single segment of flash [70]. Flash file systems are generally log-structured file systems which write changed data
to a new location in memory and garbage-collect leftover data in the background or as needed, with the exact details
being determined by a cleaning policy which determines which memory segments to clean, when to clean them, and
where to write changed data [71][72][73]. Because of this type of operation it’s not possible to cycle fresh cells to
reduce remanence effects without bypassing the filesystem, in fact the operation of the wear-levelling system acts to
create a worst-case situation in which data is always written to fresh cells. Trying to burn in an area of storage by
creating a file and overwriting it 10-100 times will result in that many copies of the data being written to different
storage locations, followed by the actual data being written to yet another fresh storage location. Even writing
enough data to cycle through all storage locations (which may be unnecessarily painful when the goal is to secure a
1 kB data area on a device containing 256 MB of non-critical data) may not be sufficient, since pseudorandom
storage location selection techniques can result in some locations being overwritten many times and others being
overwritten only a handful of times.
There is no general solution to this problem, since the goal of wear-levelling is the exact opposite of the (controlled)
wearing which is needed to avoid remanence problems. Some possible application-specific solutions could include
using direct access to memory cells if available, or using knowledge of the particular device- or filesystem’s
cleaning policy to try and negate it and provide the required controlled wearing. Since this involves bypassing the
primary intended function of the filesystem, it’s a somewhat risky and tricky move.

7. Conclusion
Although the wide variety of devices and technologies in use, and the continuing introduction of new technologies
not explicitly addressed in this work, make providing specific guidelines impossible, the following general design
rules should help in making it harder to recover data from semiconductor memory and devices:
 Don’t store cryptovariables for long time periods in RAM. Move them to new locations from time to time
and zeroise the original storage, or flip the bits if that’s feasible.
 Cycle EEPROM/flash cells 10-100 times with random data before writing anything sensitive to them to
eliminate any noticeable effects arising from the use of fresh cells (but see also the point further down
about over-intelligent non-volatile storage systems).

15
  Don’t assume that a key held in RAM in a piece of crypto hardware such as an RSA accelerator, which
reuses the same cryptovariable(s) constantly, has been destroyed when the RAM has been cleared. Hot-
carrier and electromigration effects in the crypto circuitry could retain an afterimage of the key long after
the original has leaked away into the substrate.
 As a corollary, try and design devices such as RSA accelerators which will reuse a cryptovariable over and
over again in such a way that they avoid repeatedly running the same signals over dedicated data lines.
 Remember that some non-volatile memory devices are a little too intelligent, and may leave copies of
sensitive data in mapped-out memory blocks after the active copy has been erased. Devices and/or
filesystems which implement wear-levelling techniques are also problematic since there’s no way to know
where your data is really going unless you can access the device at a very low level.
Finally, however, the best defence against data remanence problems in semiconductor memory is, as with the related
problem of data stored on magnetic media, the fact that ever-shrinking device dimensions (DRAM density is
increasing by 50% per year [74]), and the use of novel techniques such as multilevel storage (which is being used in
flash memory and may eventually make an appearance in DRAM as well [75]) is making it more and more difficult
to recover data from devices. As the 1996 paper suggested for magnetic media, the easiest way to make the task of
recovering data difficult is to use the newest, highest-density (and by extension most exotic) storage devices
available.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Steve Weingart and the referees for their feedback and comments on this paper and
Dr.Veng-cheong Lo for permission to reproduce the electromigration images.
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