Pulse-Based Capacitive Memory Window with High Non-Destructive Read Endurance in Fully BEOL Compatible Ferroelectric Capacitors
Shankha Mukherjee, Jasper Bizindavyi, Y-C. Luo, Sergiu Clima, J. Read, M. Popovici, Y. Xiang, N. Bazzazian, A. Belmonte, Romain Delhougne, Gouri Sankar Kar, Francky Catthoor, V. V. Afanas’ev, Shimeng Yu, Jan Van Houdt
Abstract
Achieving an energy-efficient, non-volatile memory window (MW) with non-destructive read operation (NDRO) remains a challenge for random access memory, compute-in-memory, and machine learning frameworks. In this work, we report on achieving a record high ferroelectric (FE) capacitive MW (CMW) of ~8.7 at 0 V by introducing an interfacial asymmetry between the electrodes of a fully BEOL compatible HZO-based metal-FE-metal (MFM) FE capacitor (FeCAP). We demonstrate that the CMW can also be read non-destructively using pulses, instead of C-V measurements, which are more reflective of practical charge-based read-circuit implementations. Furthermore, for the first time, we experimentally show that the NDRO leads to a full decoupling of the read- and write-endurance, thereby allowing for a non-destructive read-endurance beyond 10 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">11</sup> cycles even though the write-endurance is limited to ~10 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">7</sup> cycles. Moreover, we investigate read voltage optimization to achieve higher CMW while maintaining NDRO and bench-mark the device performance towards system realization.