Novel Energy-efficient Hafnia-based Ferroelectric Processing-in-Sensor with in-situ Motion Detection and Four-quarter Mutipilcation

In this work, CMOS-compatible ferroelectric (FE) HfO2 capacitor based processing-in-sensor (PIS) hardware is proposed and experimentally demonstrated for the first time, realizing zero-power sense and inference with in-situ motion detection and four-quarter multilevel multiply-accumulation (MAC). By utilizing the intrinsic pyroelectric effect and the multi-domain features of FE-HfO2, the proposed non-volatile PIS device can experimentally implement local multiplication of sensing input signal and polarization-modulated signed weight by only one FE capacitor, without the need of sensing power or extra peripheral differential circuits for motion detection, along with the advantages of low operation voltage (2V), high endurance (10(14) cycles), long retention (10 years) and good consistency. Besides, the optimized fabricated FE-HfO2 PIS device also exhibits the record highest pyroelectric sensitivity among FE-HfO2 materials. Furthermore, the infrared (IR) response of the proposed FE-PIS array is also experimentally demonstrated, enabling multilevel signed MAC with high linearity for IR motion detection. Based on proposed FE-PIS design, motion pattern recognition and further data compression tasks with high accuracy (99%) are realized, showing its great potential for edge AI