A novel ferroelectric material for nonvolatile memory applications

Ferroelectric memories have been under development for more than 15 years at an industry wide cost of several hundred million dollars. First commercial products were introduced in 1992, but ferroelectric memories have not yet become mainstream despiteunquestionable technical advantages (e.g. non-volativity, speed, power and endurance). The reason for this are high manufacturing cost and low memory size. This program addresses these challanges by developing a very dense memory cell based on a singlelarger memory sizes (>64MBit). One of the difficulties in realizing such a cell is to find a suitable ferroelectric material that can be deposited on silicon forming a stable interface and showing good performance, particularly adequate retention time.We believe that we have found such a material and we have conducted a feasibility study in Phase I were we built and characterized capacitor structures with this material.In Phase II we will build actual ferroelectric transistors witht he novel gate material. Memory products built using this technology will be able to compete not only with EEPROM and battery backed SRAMs, the current market, but also with Flash and DRAMs,a much bigger, multi billion dollar market.The proposed technology will enable high density low cost ferroelectric memory products allowing ferroelectric products to compete in the mainstream semiconductor memory market.