Investigation of the Impact of Externally Applied Out-of-Plane Stress on Ferroelectric FET

The impact of out-of-plane mechanical stress on a hafnium zirconium oxide (HZO) based ferroelectric field effect transistor (FeFET) is studied using a nanoindenter combined with in-situ probing. It is demonstrated that the hysteresis loop shrinks with increasing compressive stress. The device current shows significant dependence on mechanical stress. By ab initio simulations, the Landau potentials of HZO under stress are calculated. The parameters of the Landau-Khalatnikov (LK) equation are extracted and used as input to a TCAD model. The simulation results match well to the experimental results.