Transient modeling of ferroelectric capacitors for nonvolatile memories

Present ferroelectric (FE) capacitor models mostly rely on continuous hysteresis loop characteristics of FE materials. Our experimental results show that this approach overestimates the remanent and saturation polarizations available for nonvolatile semiconductor memories by more than 50%. A behavioral transient model based on pulse measurement results is proposed and implemented as an HSPICE macro-model. The model mainly consists of two nonlinear capacitors, corresponding to the two different polarization states of an FE capacitor.