Nanoelectronics: Ferroelectric devices show potential.

The quest for a non-volatile memory technology that offers high storage density, high read and write speeds, and low power consumption has triggered intense research into new materials, mechanisms and device architectures. Among the successful memory technologies to emerge from these efforts have been the atomic switch, the resistive RAM and the magnetic tunnel junction. Prof. Adrian Ionescu (NANOLAB - Nanoelectronic Devices Laboratory) comments on the recent paper in Nature Nanotechnology, in which researchers from France, the UK and the US report a substantial advance in an alternative approach to non-volatile memory technology based on ferroelectric tunnel junctions. In particular they have shown that it is possible to achieve high off/on ratios, and very low write powers, in a highly reproducible manner with the ferroelectric approach. The France–UK–US team also attempts to address a long-standing controversy about the relative importance of electron tunnelling and ionic effects in these devices.

Adrian M. Ionescu, Nature Nanotechnology 7, 83–85 (2012) doi:10.1038/nnano.2012.10