Investigation of Defect Engineering Toward Prolonged Endurance for HfZrO Based Ferroelectric Device

This paper reports the defect analyses of interfacial layer (IL) and HfZrO (HZO) stacks from high-endurance ferroelectric (FE) devices. Trap characterization for IL and HZO were evaluated by measuring frequency-dependent capacitance and flicker noise of leakage in IL and HZO respectively accompanied with simulation work on mechanism study. We validated the critical roles to enhance device endurance by (a) inserting optimized IL with fast de-trapping behavior and (b) doped-HZO with highly conductive grain boundary in metal-FE-semiconductor-metal (MFSM) and metal-FE-metal (MFM) stacks. In addition, a turn-around device lifetime corresponding to stress frequency was firstly reported on HZO FE devices, indicating improved de-trapping capabilities under higher frequency operation to achieve a longer device lifetime. In this work, we also demonstrated device with defect engineering in MFM stacks to achieve ~ 5 × 10 ¹¹ endurance-cycle under high frequency operation, which is promising for FE device application.