Design Space Exploration of Ferroelectric Tunnel Junction Toward Crossbar Memories

Abstract

We perform a simulation-based analysis on the potential of emerging ferroelectric tunnel junctions (FTJs) as a memory device for crossbar arrays. Though FTJs are promising due to their low power switching characteristics compared to other emerging technologies, the greatest challenge for FTJs is the tradeoff between integration density and read performance. Our analysis highlights the need to co-optimize the ferroelectric thickness of the FTJ and read/write voltages to achieve proper functionality at large array sizes. Our analysis shows that FTJ-based crossbar achieves 93% higher sense margin at isoread power of 116 nW (per bit), but this FTJ design comes at a cost of $9.28\times $ higher write power at isowrite time of 250 ns. In response, we study the potential tradeoffs of design points outside the feasible region to understand what device characteristics are desired to overcome such challenges.

Keywords

• Crossbar
• ferroelectric devices
• magnetic memory
• nonvolatile memory (NVM)