Niobium Improves Ferroelectric
The company developed a special technique to introduce niobium in 20 to 30 times the quantity that was previously practically possible. The new material overcomes the oxygen deficit that can cause reliability problems with FeRAM. The company is testing FeRAM-based electronic devices using the new PZTN material.
With PZT devices, repeated rewriting of data causes the material's ferroelectric and insulating properties to change over time, making it difficult to guarantee reliability. The conventional approach to solving this problem was to try to secure reliability by adding other materials, which had the adverse effect of reducing the memory properties of PZT.
Epson researchers found the cause of this reliability degradation to be an oxygen deficit, which was overcome by introducing niobium. The company's tests revealed that the introduction of niobium not only preserved the basic properties of PZT, but raised the level of insulation by about 10,000 times. Fatigue properties have also been improved.
While conventional PZT suffers property degradation of more than 50% after 1bn rewrite operations, PZTN suffers very little degradation. While conventional materials had problems with imprint properties - meaning that the written-in data changes with time - PZTN was found to experience very little property degradation - even after 100mn write operations. Epson also found that PZTN displayed superior electrical properties even after conducting the patterning process for high-density memory.
The new material's properties could allow it to be used at the Mbit level and above, claims Seiko Epson.
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