Ferroelectrics: From Memory to Computing

Research discovery of ferroelectricity in doped hafnium dioxide thin films has ignited tremendous activity in exploration of ferroelectric FETs for a range of applications from low-power logic to embedded non-volatile memory to in-memory compute kernels. In this paper, key milestones in the evolution of Ferroelectric Field Effect Transistors (FeFETs) and the emergence of a versatile ferroelectronic platform are presented. FeFET exhibits superior energy efficiency and high performance as embedded nonvolatile memory. When embedded into logic, such as SRAM or D-flip-flop, nonvolatile processor can be designed, which is critical for intermittent computing with unreliable power. The partial polarization switching in multi-domain ferroelectric can be harnessed to develop analog synaptic weight cell for deep learning accelerators. To further improve the energy-efficiency of computation, ferroelectric in-memory computing hardware primitive is designed, with one prominent example of ferroelectric TCAM. Utilizing the ferroelectric switching dynamics, ferroelectric neuron with intrinsic homeostasis can be realized to enable a unified ferroelectric platform for spiking neural network. From all these developments, ferroelectric emerges as a highly promising platform for various exciting applications.