A Study of Endurance Issues in HfO2-Based Ferroelectric Field Effect Transistors: Charge Trapping and Trap Generation

Recent demonstration of aggressively scaled HfO
₂
-based ferroelectric field effect transistors (FE-HfO
₂
-FETs) has illustrated a pathway to fabricate FeFETs that enjoy COMS-compatibility, low power, fast switching speed, scalability, and long retention. One potential issue of this promising technology is its limited endurance, which has been attributed to the degradation of gate stack before the fatigue of polarization in the ferroelectric HfO
₂
layer. Some associated work has identified charge trapping and trap generation as key villains, but a clear understanding of two aforementioned underlining mechanisms is still missing. In this letter, we initiated this letter to investigate the roles of charge trapping and trap generation in causing endurance failure of FE-HfO
₂
FETs.