The Ferroelectric Superconducting Field Effect Transistor

TL;DR

This paper reports the discovery of ferroelectricity in a superconducting Josephson FET operating below 1 Kelvin, demonstrating hysteresis and non-volatile memory capabilities with potential for cryogenic data storage and computation.

Contribution

It introduces a novel ferroelectric superconducting FET on an InAs platform, revealing ferroelectricity in a superconducting device and exploring its applications in cryogenic memory.

Findings

Observed ferroelectricity in a superconducting Josephson FET at cryogenic temperatures.

Demonstrated non-volatile memory operation with retention over 24 hours.

Showed potential for temperature-fault-tolerant cryogenic memory applications.

Abstract

The ferroelectric field-effect transistor (Fe-FET) is a three-terminal semiconducting device first introduced in the 1950s. Despite its potential, a significant boost in Fe-FET research occurred about ten years ago with the discovery of ferroelectricity in hafnium oxide. This material has been incorporated into electronic processes since the mid-2000s. Here, we observed ferroelectricity in a superconducting Josephson FET (Fe-JoFET) operating at cryogenic temperatures below 1 Kelvin. The Fe-JoFET was fabricated on the InAsOI platform, which features an InAs epilayer hosted by an electrical insulating substrate, using HfO2 as the gate insulator, making it a promising candidate due to its ferroelectric properties. The Fe-JoFET exhibits significant hysteresis in the switching current and normal-state resistance transfer characteristics, which depend on the range of gate voltages. This phenomenon opens a new research area exploring the interaction between ferroelectricity and superconductivity in hybrid superconducting-semiconducting systems, with potential applications in cryogenic data storage and computation. Supporting this, the Fe-JoFET was operated as a cryogenic superconducting single memory cell, exhibiting both dissipative and non-dissipative states. Its non-volatility was tested over a 24-hour measurement period. We also demonstrated that the Fe-JoFET can retain information at temperatures above the superconductor critical temperature, resulting in a temperature-fault-tolerant memory cell resistant to temperature oscillations or, in the worst case, cryostat faults.