Investigation of the endurance of FE-HfO 2 devices by means of TDDB studies

Ferroelectric HfO 2 devices are potential candidates for non-volatile memory applications. However, they often exhibit a pinched hysteresis, which requires the application of cycles to “wake-up” the device. In this paper, endurance of FE-Al: HfO 2 MIM is investigated using TDDB measurements. An improvement in TDDB lifetime is observed with cycling. A hypothesis involving rearrangement of defects is proposed to explain this behavior.