Physical concepts of memory device operation based on piezoacousto and pyroelectric properties of ferroelectric films

Abstract

The paper presents physical concepts of universal memory device operation based on piezoacousto and pyroelectric properties of ferroelectric materials. It is suggested to extract information about ferroelectric memory cell polarization by heating (pyroelectric approach) or mechanical deformation (piezoacousto approach) of the memory cell. The physical concepts of universal memory device operation and alternative memory array architectures are presented here, which satisfies the requirements of both a faster operation and a small effective memory cell size. For high density memory application the lowest cost can be achieved by the piezoacoustic approach, exploiting array architectures, such as cross point passive arrays and multilayer stacks. A new ferroelectric random access memory (RAM) structure, which is called acoustoferroelectric RAM, makes use of acoustic method of detecting polarization of the ferroelectric memory cells.