A Critical Examination of ‘Quasi-Static Negative Capacitance’ (QSNC) theory

Recent years have seen a boom in the interest of using the alleged ferroelectric ‘negative capacitance’ to realize low subthreshold swing of MOSFETs. According to the “quasi-static negative capacitance’ (QSNC) theory, a ferroelectric (FE) capacitor has an intrinsic but unstable ‘negative capacitance’ (NC) region. By adding a matching linear dielectric (DE) capacitor in series, it is possible to ‘stabilize’ the NC region. In this work, we examined the validity of the QSNC theory, and performed several key experiments to verify that experimental results are consistent with our theoretical assessment. Unfortunately, our overall results do not support the QSNC theory.