A team of Chinese researchers managed to increase the endurance of an emerging memory material to 10 billion write cycles; an achievement that removes one of the biggest barriers to the commercialization of this technology.
According to ITNA, the research, conducted by scientists at Xidian University in China in collaboration with City University of Hong Kong and Fudan University, was published on Thursday in the prestigious journal Science.
The main focus of this study is ferroelectric wurtzite materials and specifically the aluminum scandium nitride (AlScN) compound.
This material can store information because it has two distinct electrical states; a feature that enables fast state switching and lower energy consumption.
One of the key advantages of this material is that it is compatible with existing semiconductor production chains; a crucial point, because materials that require a new manufacturing process usually remain at the research stage.
The long-standing endurance challenge and the new solution
For commercial use, a material must withstand billions of switching cycles. Previous generations of AlScN-based devices only reached about 100 million cycles; a limitation that was mainly due to the high coercive field of this material which damages it in each switching cycle.
Instead of performing a full polarization reversal in each cycle-which exerts the greatest stress on the material-the researchers used partial and precisely controlled switching in ultra-thin capacitors. This approach left enough polarization to retain the memory effect while dramatically reducing the wear per cycle.
The result of this method was achieving an endurance of more than 10 billion cycles in devices only 45 nanometers thick; along with breakdown fields close to 10 megavolts per centimeter in the smallest samples. These figures are a record for this class of materials.