Impact of field cycling on HfO2 based non-volatile memory devices

The discovery of ferroelectricity in HfO2 and ZrO2 based dielectrics enabled the introduction of these materials in highly scalable non-volatile memory devices. Typical memory cells are using a capacitor or a transistor as the storage device. These scaled devices are sensitive to the local structure of the storage material, here the granularity of the dielectric doped HfO2 layer, varying the local ferroelectric properties. Detailed studies are conducted to correlate these structural properties to the electrical performance to further optimize the devices for future applications.