Mechanical stress effects on Pb(Zr,Ti)O3 thin-film ferroelectric capacitors embedded in a standard complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor process

Abstract

We report experimental investigations of externally applied mechanical stress on 70 nm Pb(Zr,Ti)O3 ferroelectric capacitors embedded within a 130 nm complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor manufacturing process. An average increase in the remnant polarization of 3.37% per 100 MPa compressive uniaxial stress was observed. The maximum polarization increased by 2.68% per 100 MPa, while the cycling endurance was not affected by stress. The significant difference between experiment and the lattice distortion model suggests that two mechanisms are responsible for the polarization change. These results indicate that stress engineering may be used to enhance the signal margin in ferroelectric random access memory and enable technology scaling.