A New Generation of Memory Devices Enabled by Ferroelectric Hafnia and Zirconia

With the emergence of ferroelectric HfO
2
- and ZrO
2
-based thin films, the topic of ferroelectric memories has been experiencing a renaissance. These novel ferroelectric materials promise to overcome fundamental scaling and integration roadblocks of the three basic types of ferroelectric memory concepts, FRAM, FeFET and FTJs. While the understanding of the formation of ferro- and antiferroelectric properties in HfO
2
- and ZrO
2
has matured in recent years, also new memory concepts have been suggested. Some represent an advancement of the three basic ferroelectric memories other enhance the performance of existing mainstream memories by incorporating (anti-)ferroelectric layers. The present work gives an overview of these different concepts. The CMOS compatibility allows for a large variety of device architectures, which can address the entire spectrum from mass storage to chache memory. There is a serious industry drive with demonstrators up to array level and most concepts are remarkably close to commercial state-of-the-art memories. Therefore, it seems that ferroelectric memory is finally poised to make inroads into mass markets.