title: Non-volatile memory based on the ferroelectric photovoltaic effect.
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.
authors.affiliation: School of Materials Science and Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore 639798, Singapore.
authors.forename: Rui
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Guo
authors.forename: Lu
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: You
authors.forename: Yang
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Zhou
authors.forename: Zhi Shiuh
authors.initials: ZS
authors.lastname: Lim
authors.forename: Xi
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Zou
authors.forename: Lang
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Chen
authors.forename: R
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Ramesh
authors.forename: Junling
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Wang