A Novel Hafnia-based Ferroelectric Capacitor with Antiferroelectric Zirconia Seed Layer for High Ferroelectricity and Endurance

In this work, a new Hf0.5 Zr0.5 O₂ (HZO)-based ferroelectric (FE) capacitor with a T-phase-dominated anti-ferroelectric (AFE) ZrO <inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</inf> seed layer is proposed and experimentally demonstrated, with enhanced ferroelectricity and endurance behavior simultaneously compared with conventional HZO FE capacitor or O-phase-dominated ZrO₂ / HZO capacitor. The endurance of fabricated AFE-ZrO₂ / FE-HZO stacked capacitor can be improved to more than 10⁹ while still ensuring high remanent polarization (Pᵣ), benefiting from the extracted extremely-low M phase ratio (3.7%) in HZO, the lower trap charge density (about 12% reduction) and the slower leakage current growth rate in the interface, which indicates its great potential for FE memory applications.