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New opportunities in the development and commercialization of novel photonic and electronic devices can be opened following the development of technology-compatible arbitrary-shaped ferroelectrics encapsulated in a passive environment. Here, we report and experimentally demonstrate nanoscale tailoring of ferroelectricity by an arbitrary pattern within the nonferroelectric thin film. For inducing the ferroelectric nanoregions in the nonferroelectric surrounding, we developed a technology-compatible approach of local doping of a thin (10 nm) HfO

Resistive switching (RS) device behavior is highly dependent on both insulator and electrode material properties. In particular, the bottom electrode (BE) surface morphology can strongly affect RS characteristics. In this work, Ru films with different thicknesses grown on a TiN layer by radical-enhanced atomic layer deposition (REALD) are used as an inert BE in TaOx-based RS structures. The REALD Ru surface roughness is found to increase by more than 1 order of magnitude with the increase in the reaction cycle number. Simultaneously, a wide range of RS parameters, such as switching voltage, resistance both in low and high resistance states, endurance, and so forth, monotonically change. A simplified model is proposed to explain the linkage between RS properties and roughness of the Ru surface. The field distribution was simulated based on the observed surface morphologies, and the resulting conducting filament formation was anticipated based on the local field enhancement. Conductive atomic force microscopy confirmed the theoretical expectations.

While the conductance of a first-order memristor is defined entirely by the external stimuli, in the second-order memristor it is governed by the both the external stimuli and its instant internal state. As a result, the dynamics of such devices allows to naturally emulate the temporal behavior of biological synapses, which encodes the spike timing information in synaptic weights. Here, we demonstrate a new type of second-order memristor functionality in the ferroelectric HfO2-based tunnel junction on silicon. The continuous change of conductance in the p+-Si/Hf0.5Zr0.5O2/TiN tunnel junction is achieved via the gradual switching of polarization in ferroelectric domains of polycrystalline Hf0.5Zr0.5O2 layer, whereas the combined dynamics of the built-in electric field and charge trapping/detrapping at the defect states at the bottom Si interface defines the temporal behavior of the memristor device, similar to synapses in biological systems. The implemented ferroelectric second-order memristor exhibits various synaptic functionalities, such as paired-pulse potentiation/depression and spike-rate-dependent plasticity, and can serve as a building block for the development of neuromorphic computing architectures.

Hf0.5Zr0.5O2 thin films are one of the most appealing HfO2-based ferroelectric thin films, which have been researched extensively for their applications in ferroelectric memory devices. In this work, a 1 mol % La-doped Hf0.5Zr0.5O2 thin film was grown by plasma-assisted atomic layer deposition and annealed at temperatures of 450 and 500 °C to crystallize the film into the desired orthorhombic phase. Despite the use of a lower temperature than that used in previous reports, the film showed highly promising ferroelectric properties—a remnant polarization of ∼30 μC/cm2 and switching cycle endurance up to 4 × 1010. The performance was much better than that of undoped Hf0.5Zr0.5O2 thin films, demonstrating the positive influence of La doping. Such improvements were mainly attributed to the decreased coercive field (by ∼30% compared to the undoped film), which allowed for the use of a lower applied field to drive the cycling tests while maintaining a high polarization value. La doping also decreased the leakage...

The plasma-enhanced atomic layer deposition (PEALD) process using Ta(OC2H5)5 as a Ta precursor and plasma-activated hydrogen as a reactant for the deposition of TaOx films with a controllable concentration of oxygen vacancies (VO) is reported herein. The VO concentration control was achieved by varying the hydrogen volume fraction of the hydrogen–argon mixture in the plasma, allowing the control of the leakage current density in the tantalum oxide films within the range of 5 orders of magnitude compared with the Ta2O5 film grown via thermal ALD using the identical Ta precursor and H2O. Temperature-dependent current–voltage measurements combined with Poole-Frenkel emission modeling demonstrated that the bulk trap depth decreases with the increasing hydrogen volume fraction, which could be attributed to the increase of the VO concentration. The possible chemical change in the PEALD TaOx films grown under different hydrogen volume fractions was confirmed by the in situ X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) ...