Investigation of Charge Trapping Aggravation Induced by Antiferroelectric Switching With a Unified Ferroelectric and Antiferroelectric Model

Based on experiments and simulation, we perform a systematic study to compare and under-stand the interplay between polarization switching and charge trapping (CT) for both ferroelectric (FE) metal–ferroelectric–insulator–semiconductor (MFIS) stack and antiferroelectric (AFE) MFIS stack. In order to conduct the comparative study, a unified modeling approach based on Landau theory is proposed to simulate the multidomain dynamic polarization switching of both FE and AFE phases in the doped-HfO <tex-math notation="LaTeX">₂</tex-math> FE thin films. Incorporating the unified FE/AFE model and CT model, the experimental results can be reproduced, and the different roles of FE and AFE switching in the CT process are unraveled, highlighting the aggravated CT effect induced by the AFE. We fur-ther build a comprehensive FeFET model considering: 1) phase fluctuation among FE/AFE/dielectric (DE) phases; 2) coercive field ( <tex-math notation="LaTeX">EC</tex-math> ) variation; 3) ununiform CT process; and 4) channel percolation. Our model predicts a more severe memory window (MW) degradation caused by the increased AFE phase compared with DE phase. The results emphasize the necessity of suppressing the AFE phase for the optimization of FeFETs.