Hafnium oxide based ferroelectric devices for memories and beyond

Abstract

Ferroelectricity is a material property were a remanent polarization exists under zero electrical field that can be reversed by applying an electrical field [1]. As consequence, two nonvolatile states exist that can be switched by an electrical field. This feature makes ferroelectrics ideally suited for nonvolatile memories with low write energy. Therefore, already in the 1950s first attempts have been made to realize ferroelectric nonvolatile memories based on ferroelectric barium titanate (BTO) crystals having evaporated electrodes on both sides [2]. The success of this approach was hindered by disturb issues that could be solved in the early 1990s by adding a transistor device as a selector [3]. Such a memory is referred to as a ferroelectric random access memory (FeRAM). Since reading of the ferroelectric polarization from a capacitor requires switching of the ferroelectric [1], the information will be destroyed and a write back is necessary. This can be avoided if the ferroelectric is placed inside of the gate stack of a MOS transistor resulting in a ferroelectric field effect transistor (FeFET) [1]. Conventional ferroelectric materials like BTO or lead- zirconium titanate (PZT) cannot be placed directly on silicon since unwanted interface reactions will occur. The necessary interface layer together with the space charge region of the transistor device leads to a rather low capacitance in series with the ferroelectric dielectric and consequently results in a strong depolarization field that has destroyed the nonvolatility of the FeFET device for many years and hinters scaling as well [4]. Today FeRAM devices are established on the market [3,5], but are limited to niche application since scaling is hindered by many integration problems associated to materials like PZT.