New transistor’s superlative properties could have broad electronics applications

MIT News  July 26, 2024 Ferroelectric materials change polarization in response to an electric field and are useful for memory. However, these materials often suffer from fatigue as they are cycled many times, capping their lifetime. An international team of researchers (USA – MIT, Harvard, Japan) investigated the performance of a ferroelectric field-effect transistor (FeFET) based on sliding ferroelectricity in bilayer boron nitride at room temperature. Sliding ferroelectricity represents a different form of atomically thin 2D ferroelectrics, characterized by the switching of out-of-plane polarization through interlayer sliding motion. They examined the FeFET device employing monolayer graphene as the channel layer, […]

Thinnest ferroelectric material ever paves the way for new energy-efficient devices

Phys.org  October 19, 2022 In many materials the ferroelectric behavior is suppressed at the few-nanometer scale. A team of researchers in the US (UC Berkeley, State University of Pennsylvania, Argonne National Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory) found that ferroelectricity emerges in zirconium dioxide when it is grown extremely thin, approximately 1-2 nanometers in thickness. Notably, the ferroelectric behavior continues to its near-atomic-scale thickness limit of roughly half a nanometer. This approach to exploit three-dimensional centrosymmetric materials deposited down to the two-dimensional thickness limit, particularly within this model fluorite-structure system that possesses unconventional ferroelectric size effects, offers substantial promise for electronics, […]