Non-volatile memory based on the ferroelectric photovoltaic effect.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 23756366.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/ncomms2990 and PMC identifier 3709492.
- Licence recorded as CC BY-NC-SA.
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Abstract
The quest for a solid state universal memory with high-storage density, high read/write speed, random access and non-volatility has triggered intense research into new materials and novel device architectures. Though the non-volatile memory market is dominated by flash memory now, it has very low operation speed with ~10 μs programming and ~10 ms erasing time. Furthermore, it can only withstand ~10(5) rewriting cycles, which prevents it from becoming the universal memory. Here we demonstrate that the significant photovoltaic effect of a ferroelectric material, such as BiFeO3 with a band gap in the visible range, can be used to sense the polarization direction non-destructively in a ferroelectric memory. A prototype 16-cell memory based on the cross-bar architecture has been prepared and tested, demonstrating the feasibility of this technique.