A non-destructive readout mechanism for ferroelectric capacitors
The demonstration of a non-destructive read operation for FeCAPs presents a milestone towards compute-in-memory applications
Ferroelectric capacitors (FeCAPs) are an energy-efficient alternative to resistive types of memories for analog compute-in-memory (CiM) applications.
However, since conventional read operations for FeCAPs are destructive, the read endurance is limited by the write endurance, which is insufficient for CiM.
Imec and the Georgia Institute of Technology have demonstrated a non-destructive read operation for the first time, enabling fully decoupled read and write endurance.
They achieved a non-destructive read endurance of >1011and a capacitive memory window of 8.7 (at 0V) – the largest values reported for FeCAPs. The results were presented at 2023 IEDM.
This article was published in EDN.
Authors
Jan Van Houdt
Jan Van Houdt received a Ph.D. from the KU Leuven. During his PhD work, he invented the HIMOS™ Flash memory, which he transferred to several industrial production lines. In 1999, he became responsible for Flash memory at imec and as such was the driving force behind the expansion of imec’s Industrial Affiliation Program on Memory Technology. Jan has published more than 300 papers in international journals and accumulated more than 250 conference contributions (incl. ~50 invitations and 5 best paper awards). He has filed about 80 patents and served on the program and organizing committees of 10 major semiconductor conferences. In 2014, he received the title of IEEE Fellow for his contributions to Flash memory devices. In the same year, he started the Ferroelectrics program at imec and became a guest professor at the KU Leuven teaching on CMOS and memory technology. Today, he is Scientific Director at imec, active both in the memory as well as in the logic scaling programs.
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