Stabilizing the Ferroelectric Phase in HfAlO Ferroelectric Tunnel Junction With Different Bottom Electrodes
Zhenhai Li, Jialin Meng, Jiajie Yu, Yongkai Liu, Tianyu Wang, Kang Xu, Hao Zhu, Qingqing Sun, David Wei Zhang, Lin Chen
Abstract
To satisfy the demand of high-speed and low-power non-volatile memory in the field of integrated circuits for in-memory computing, HfO2-based ferroelectric tunnel junctions have been development with different film thickness and bottom electrodes. In this study, we investigated the influence of bottom electrode on the ferroelectric characteristics of HfO2-based devices by the first-principles calculations and experimental results. First-principles analysis verified that the device with GaAs bottom electrode showed robust ferroelectric properties with remanent polarization of about <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$20 \mu \text{C}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> /cm2 due to high O-phase proportion. Meanwhile, the samples with GaAs and Pt bottom electrode display excellent retention properties owing to the high system energy. These results pave the way the development of HfO2-base ferroelectric tunnel junctions.