Non-volatile memory based on the ferroelectric photovoltaic effect

作者：Guo, Rui; You, Lu; Zhou, Yang; Lim, Zhi Shiuh; Zou, Xi; Chen, Lang; Ramesh, R.; Wang, Junling^*

来源：Nature Communications, 2013, 4(1): 1990.

DOI：10.1038/ncomms2990

• MECHANISM

The quest for a solid state universal memory with high-storage density, high read/write speed, random access and non-volatility has triggered intense research into new materials and novel device architectures. Though the non-volatile memory market is dominated by flash memory now, it has very low operation speed with similar to 10 mu s programming and similar to 10 ms erasing time. Furthermore, it can only withstand similar to 10(5) rewriting cycles, which prevents it from becoming the universal memory. Here we demonstrate that the significant photovoltaic effect of a ferroelectric material, such as BiFeO3 with a band gap in the visible range, can be used to sense the polarization direction non-destructively in a ferroelectric memory. A prototype 16-cell memory based on the cross-bar architecture has been prepared and tested, demonstrating the feasibility of this technique.

• 出版日期2013-6