A system and method are disclosed for providing drain avalanche hot carrier (DAHC) programming for non-volatile memory (NVM) applications. A memory cell of the present invention comprises a program transistor and a control capacitor, each having a gate coupled together to form a floating gate. The size of the program transistor is selected to create a coupling ratio between the program transistor and the control capacitor that is large enough to facilitate a Fowler-Nordheim erase process and small enough to facilitate DACH programming. A source bias voltage is supplied to the source of the program transistor to increase the hot electron injection rate and to decrease the hot electron generation rate in the memory cell.