For the
first time, engineering researchers have been able to watch in real time the
nanoscale process of a ferroelectric memory bit switching between the 0 and 1
states.
Ferroelectric
materials have the potential to replace current memory designs, offering
greater storage capacity than magnetic hard drives and faster write speed and
longer lifetimes than flash memory. Replacing dynamic random access memory—the
short-term memory that allows computers to operate—with ferroelectric memory
can significantly decrease energy usage in computers. Ferroelectric memory
doesn’t require power to retain data.
A paper on
the research is published in Science.
“This
is a direct visualization of the operation of ferroelectric memory,” says
principal investigator Xiaoqing Pan, a professor in the Department of Materials
Science and Engineering and director of the U-M Electron Microbeam Analysis
Laboratory.
“By
following ferroelectric switching at this scale in real time, we’ve been able
to observe new and unexpected phenomena. This work will help us understand how
these systems work so one can make better memory devices that are faster,
smaller, and more reliable.”
The
researchers were able to see that the switching process of ferroelectric memory
begins at a different site in the material than they initially believed. And
this switching can be sparked with a lot less power than they had hypothesized.
“In
this system, electric fields are naturally formed at the
ferroelectric/electrode interfaces and this lowers the barrier for
switching—for free. That means you can write information with much lower power
consumption,” Pan says.
Pan is
leading the development of special hybrid materials that contain both
ferroelectric and magnetic components and could lead to next-generation
magnetoelectric memory devices. This new study reports the behavior of one such
material. An advantage of using these hybrid materials in memories is that they
combine the advantages of both electric and magnetic memory classes: the ease
of writing ferroelectric memory and the ease of reading magnetic memory. The
interactions between ferroelectric and magnetic orders allow these hybrid
materials to be integrated into other novel designs such as spintronics, which
harness the intrinsic “up” or “down” spin of electrons.
