The objective of the European 3εFERRO project is to design and develop new non-volatile ferroelectric memories, which state can be changed by applying a simple electric field, and directly integrated into CMOS logic circuits, and thus compatible with the silicon technology. Such memories must allow the development of new devices and to drastically reduce the power consumption of information storage and processing.
The rapidly growing Internet of Things (IoT) requires intelligent, fast and energy efficient handling of data beyond current storage and processing capabilities.
While data transfer between a Central Processing Unit (CPU) and an embedded non-volatile memory (eNVM) is the usual design, new approaches are required to take advantage of smart power gating methods. Memory elements could be embedded in an advanced CMOS platform and distributed close to the logic circuits to locally store information and make logic circuits non-volatile. New, more robust eNVM with higher speeds, lower power and high endurance would then replace eFlash in micro-controller units, allowing flexible logic in memory (LiM) designs, which will improve energy efficiency in information processing.
Ferroelectric memories (FeRAMs) have the highest endurance among all NVM candidates, low energy per bit transfer and low global power consumption. However, current perovskite-based memories have serious scaling, Si-compatibility and cost problems.
3εFERRO will use HfO2 based materials, recently discovered as ferroelectric, to develop a competitive and versatile FeRAM technology for eNVM solutions. HfO2 is Si-compatible and allows the scaling of CMOS advanced technologies.
Moreover, ferroelectric HfO2 could be integrated into CMOS transistor gates for 1T FeFET (Ferroelectric-gate Field-effect-transistors) memory cells with non-destructive read. This opens the possibility of realizing new, fine grained LiM designs to significantly improve energy efficiency of processing and storage units.
Collaboration :
- Commissariat à l’Énergie Atomique et aux Énergies Alternatives
- STMicroelectronics
- NaMLab gGmbH
- National Institute of Materials Physics
- École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
- École Centrale de Lyon
- National Centre of Scientific Research “Demokritos”
- Forschungszentrum Jülich
Contact CEA : Nick Barrett (SPEC/LENSIS).
