Logic Compatible High-Performance Ferroelectric Transistor Memory

TL;DR

This paper presents an IL-free ferroelectric FET with low voltage, high speed, and high endurance, suitable for on-chip memory and compute-in-memory applications, overcoming limitations of traditional FeFETs.

Contribution

The authors demonstrate a novel IL-free FeFET with high performance and endurance, compatible with BEOL processes, using a 5nm HfZrO2 gate stack and amorphous IWO channel.

Findings

Achieved 1.2V memory window and 10^5 read current window.

Demonstrated write latency of 20ns with +/-2V pulses.

Exceeded 5x10^10 endurance cycles and enabled 2-bit/cell programming.

Abstract

Silicon ferroelectric field-effect transistors (FeFETs) with low-k interfacial layer (IL) between ferroelectric gate stack and silicon channel suffers from high write voltage, limited write endurance and large read-after-write latency due to early IL breakdown and charge trapping and detrapping at the interface. We demonstrate low voltage, high speed memory operation with high write endurance using an IL-free back-end-of-line (BEOL) compatible FeFET. We fabricate IL-free FeFETs with 28nm channel length and 126nm width under a thermal budget <400C by integrating 5nm thick Hf0.5Zr0.5O2 gate stack with amorphous Indium Tungsten Oxide (IWO) semiconductor channel. We report 1.2V memory window and read current window of 10^5 for program and erase, write latency of 20ns with +/-2V write pulses, read-after-write latency <200ns, write endurance cycles exceeding 5x10^10 and 2-bit/cell programming capability. Array-level analysis establishes IL-free BEOL FeFET as a promising candidate for logic-compatible high-performance on-chip buffer memory and multi-bit weight cell for compute-in-memory accelerators.