Ferroelectric memories at last

15th March 2023

Timing : 1 pm EST

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For a list of all talks at the NanoBio seminar Series Spring'23, see here


In spite of being one of the first (or perhaps the first) non-volatile semiconducting memory demonstrated almost 70 years ago, ferroelectrics have struggled to compete in the race towards miniaturization. It is only recently that ferroelectric memories can be scaled down sufficiently to be introduced at the industrial scale. The enabler of this success is hafnia (HfO2), traditionally used as a refractory material and, more recently, as insulating layer in transistors. No one expected to find any interesting electronic functionality in HfO2. Surprisingly, since a decade ago, it is possible to stabilize it in a polar switchable (ferroelectric) state at sizes as small as a few nanometers, something that is not possible in any other known ferroelectric. How this material managed to achieve this is not fully understood but as time passes, we slowly gather more pieces of the hafnia puzzle. Interestingly the advent of hafnia-based ferroelectrics, coincides with the surge of research on neuromorphic materials and the hafnia family also show great promise as artificial synapses. I will give an overview of the most important results from my group on this interesting material.



Snow
Dr. Beatriz Noheda
Professor
Zernike Institute for Advanced Materials & Cogni/Gron center
University of Groningen, The Netherlands

Beatriz Noheda is full Professor at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands, where she chairs the Nanostructures of Functional Oxides group, at the Zernike Institute for Advanced Materials, and is the founding director of the Groningen Cognitive Systems and Materials center (Cogni/Gron).

Noheda arrived in Groningen in 2004 after being awarded a Rosalind Franklin Fellowship. Before that, she had been Assistant Physicist (tenure-track) at the Physics Department in Brookhaven National Laboratory (New York), and as beamline scientist at the NSLS synchrotron. Noheda had also held research stays and positions at Clarendon Laboratory in Oxford and Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, after receiving her PhD in Physics from the UAM in Madrid (1996).

Noheda is a Fellow of the American Physical Society since 2011 and recipient of the IEEE- Robert E. Newnham Ferroelectrics Award in 2021. She has been elected member of the Netherlands Academy of Technology and Innovation (AcTI, the Dutch Academy of Engineering) and has served as member of numerous national and international committees, as well as of several editorial boards. She is author of more than 150 publications, receives more than 10 personal invitations per year to speak in international conferences and has given 10 plenary/keynote talks.