Single Crystal Functional Oxides on Silicon

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates the successful integration of single crystal complex oxide films onto silicon substrates at room temperature, enabling functional properties like ferroelectric control in electronic devices.

Contribution

It introduces a novel epitaxial transfer method for single crystalline oxide films onto silicon, overcoming previous integration challenges.

Findings

Reversible control of semiconductor charge via ferroelectric polarization.

Integration of ultrathin oxide films down to 1 unit cell.

Functional oxide-based transistor demonstration.

Abstract

Single crystalline thin films of complex oxides show a rich variety of functional properties such as ferroelectricity, piezoelectricity, ferro and antiferromagnetism etc. that have the potential for completely new electronic applications (1-2). Direct synthesis of such oxides on Si remains challenging due to the fundamental crystal chemistry and mechanical incompatibility of dissimilar interfaces (3-16). Here we report integration of thin (down to 1 unit cell) single crystalline, complex oxide films onto Si substrates, by epitaxial transfer at room temperature. In a field effect transistor using a transferred Pb0.2Zr0.8TiO3 (PZT) layer as the gate insulator, we demonstrate direct reversible control of the semiconductor channel charge with polarization state. These results represent the realization of long pursued but yet to be demonstrated single crystal functional oxides on-demand on silicon.