Recent advances, perspectives and challenges in ferroelectric synapses

TL;DR

This paper reviews recent progress in ferroelectric synapses, highlighting their advantages such as reliable switching and low energy use, and discusses future research directions for neural network applications.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive summary of recent developments in ferroelectric synapses, including various device structures and their potential for brain-like computing.

Findings

Ferroelectric synapses offer reliable performance due to intrinsic domain switching.

They consume extremely low energy by avoiding Joule heating.

Recent work includes ferroelectric tunnel junctions, diodes, and FETs.

Abstract

The multiple ferroelectric polarization tuned by external electric field could be used to simulate the biological synaptic weight. Ferroelectric synaptic devices have two advantages compared with other reported ones: One is the intrinsic switching of ferroelectric domains without invoking of defect migration as in resistive oxides contributes reliable performance in these ferroelectric synapses. Another tremendous advantage is the extremely low energy consumption because the ferroelectric polarization is manipulated by electric field which eliminate the Joule heating by current as in magnetic and phase change memory. Ferroelectric synapses are potential for the construction of low-energy and effective brain-like intelligent networks. Here we summarize recent pioneering work of ferroelectric synapses involving the structure of ferroelectric tunnel junctions (FTJs), ferroelectric diodes (FDs) and ferroelectric field effect transistors (FeFETs), respectively, and shed light on future work needed to accelerate their application for efficient neural network.