Sayeef Salahuddin

Plenary

UC Berkeley

Ultrathin Ferroelectricity and Its Application in Future Logic and Memory Devices

Compared to archetypical perovskites, fluorite HfO2 based ferroelectric materials are process-compatible with advanced CMOS transistors. As a result, they promise to bring ferroelectric technologies into wide-spread applications. At the same time, ferroelectricity in these materials is also different. In conventional perovskites, the polarization becomes weaker as the thickness is decreased due to ‘size effects’. Balking this conventional trend, our recent work has shown that ferroelectricity in HfO2 in fact enhances as the thickness goes down. The ferroelectricity can be demonstrated even in a 1 nm film, which is just two-unit cells! In this presentation I shall discuss these results. In addition, I shall also discuss Negative Capacitance transistors with just 18A thick ferroelectric material- the same thickness of high- dielectric used in today’s advanced transistors. I shall further present ferroelectric tunnel junction results with 1 nm ferroelectric. These results demonstrate that, unlike conventional ferroelectrics, thickness scaling is not a bottleneck for HfO2 based ferroelectrics, paving the way for their integration in the most advanced logic and memory devices.

Presenter Bio

S. Salahuddin is the TSMC Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California Berkeley. His work has focused mostly on conceptualization and exploration of novel physics for low power electronic and spintronic devices. Salahuddin received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientist and Engineers (PECASE) from President Obama. Salahuddin also received a number of other awards including the National Science Foundation CAREER award, the IEEE Nanotechnology Early Career Award, the Young Investigator Awards from the Airforce Office of Scientific Research and the Army Research Office, and the IEEE George E Smith Award. Salahuddin is a co-director of the Berkeley Device Modeling Center (BDMC) and Berkeley Center for Negative Capacitance Transistors (BCNCT). Salahuddin is also a co-director of ASCENT, which is a flagship device technology effort in the US, jointly supported by SRC and DARPA. He served on the editorial board of IEEE Electron Devices Letters (2013-16) and was the chair the IEEE Electron Devices Society committee on Nanotechnology (2014-16). Salahuddin is a Fellow of the IEEE and the APS.