Ferroelectric Microelectronics: Designing Functional Dielectrics for Energy-Efficient Electronics, Piush Behera

Abstract:

The energy consumption of modern computation and communication technologies is increasing rapidly and could demand a substantial fraction of the world’s energy supply in the coming decades. Addressing this challenge requires advances in materials that enable more energy-efficient logic and memory devices. Ferroelectric materials are uniquely positioned to enhance microelectronic devices through their electric-field-switchable polarization. In this talk, I will discuss how ferroelectric materials can be engineered and integrated for energy-efficient, high-performance computing.

I will first examine the fundamental origins of ferroelectricity and show how electrical and mechanical boundary conditions stabilize new functional states in epitaxial perovskite heterostructures, including swirling polar textures and the phenomena arising from these topological ferroelectric structures. I will then turn to fluorite-structure HfO2-ZrO2 ferroelectrics, whose scalability and CMOS compatibility enable integration into transistor gate stacks. I will show that in ultrathin atomic-layer-deposited (ALD) ZrO2 films, ferroelectricity persists within ultrathin, ultrasmall regimes leading to emergent negative permittivity effects. These negative-permittivity gate stacks can enable unprecedented thickness scaling and significant performance gains in CMOS transistors, demonstrating that ferroelectric negative permittivity can act as a universal transistor performance booster across device architectures and channel materials

Bio:

Piush Behera is currently a Postdoctoral Associate in the Research Laboratory of Electronics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research focuses on integrating ferroelectric materials into Si-based logic, memory, and power delivery technologies. He received his B.S. in Materials Science and Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, graduating with the Henry Ford II Award and Bronze Tablet honors. He completed his Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, under the guidance of Prof. Ramamoorthy Ramesh, where he studied emergent properties in single-crystalline ferroelectric heterostructures.