Numerical study of synaptic behavior in amorphous HfO2-based ferroelectric-like FETs generated by voltage-driven ion migration

TL;DR

This paper presents a numerical study of amorphous HfO2-based ferroelectric-like FETs, analyzing how physical parameters influence their synaptic emulation capabilities for neuromorphic applications.

Contribution

It introduces a self-consistent numerical tool to analyze ion migration and electrostatics in ferroelectric-like FETs, highlighting their potential for synaptic function emulation.

Findings

Ion mobility and concentration significantly affect device behavior.

The FETs can emulate various biological synapse functions.

Physical parameters can be optimized for neuromorphic applications.

Abstract

The continuous effort in making artificial neural networks more alike to human brain calls for the hardware elements to implement biological synapse-like functionalities. The recent experimental demonstration of ferroelectric-like FETs promises low-power operation as compared to the conventional ferroelectric switching devices. This work presents an in-house numerical tool, which self-consistently solves the electrostatics and time-dependent electronic and ionic transport. The tool is exploited to analyze the effect that various physical parameters such as mobility and ion concentration could have on the design of the ferroelectric-like FETs. Their suitability in emulating different functions of the biological synapses is also demonstrated.