Interplay of Switching Characteristics, Cycling Endurance and Multilevel Retention of Ferroelectric Capacitor

Recent research has extensively investigated the ferroelectric Hf
_0.5
Zr
_0.5
O
₂
(HZO) thin film as a key enabler for emerging non-volatile memory (eNVM) and synaptic device for neuro-inspired computing. However, the reliability of HZO is not systematically characterized yet. For example, 1) post-cycling retention is rarely reported, 2) intermediate state retention is largely unexplored; 3) activation energy (E
_a
) of the retention degradation with respect to the device failure time is unrevealed. Herein, we experimentally characterized 10 nm-thick plasma-enhanced atomic-layer-deposited (PEALD) HZO capacitors at the pristine, woken-up and fatigued states. The interplay of polarization switching speed, pulse cycling and multilevel retention is explored under variables such as device size and electric field. Woken-up state is found to be the most vulnerable to retention degradation with approximately E
_a
=0.37 eV extracted.