New Ferroelectric Materials for Nonvolatile Memory Applications.

"Interest in ferroelectric technology for Nonvolatile Memory Applications has increasedin recent years and first products are now commercially available. Ferroelectricmemories offer many advantages over competing technologies, but they still sufferfrom unresolved problems that have prevented them of becoming mainstream products.One of these issues is to scale the technology to make a high density (>16 Mbit) lowcost (small cell size) memory feasible. The most attractive approach to a highdensity memory is to use a merged cell consisting of only one transistor with aferroelectric gate dielectric, without a separate storage capacitor; a cell thatwould be considerably denser than any other semiconductor memory cell. One of thedifficulties in realizing such a cell is to find a ferroelectric material that canbe deposited directly on silicon and integrated in standard CMOS technology. Webelieve that we have found such a family materials and propose to conduct afeasibility study in Phase I, building capacitor structures and characterize themusing standard test methods. In Phase II we will build arrays of 1T cells. Theresults are applicable to commercial NVRAMs (EEPROM, Flash), but can also directlyreplace DRAMs. Benefits: A novel ferroelectric material will be developed that will make a reliable, low cost, ferroelectric gate transistor in a 1T nonvolatile memory cell feasible.Potential Applications: A ferroelectric memory using the proposed m