Physical insights on imprint and application to functional memory with ferroelectric materials

Abstract

This paper has described a new concept on imprint phenomenon and an application of ferroelectric capacitor devices to new LSI architecture. The reduction in only opposite remanent polarization of poled side is observed experimentally. It is possible to explain the phenomenon using a pinning model. The thermionic field emission model also supports the pinning model. The features of new cell are minimum cell area with three elements including ferroelectric capacitor similar to DRAM and simple peripheral circuits without refresh circuits different from DRAM. Test chip for functional memory with add operation as an internal logic is designed and fabricated. The functional operation is verified experimentally by observation of output waveform after internal calculation. The results are positively a technical evidence for feasibility of ferroelectric functional memory.

Key Words:

• ferroelectric
• imprint
• emission
• memory cell
• LSI