In-Plane Ferroelectric Tunnel Junction

Ferroelectric materials offer an important platform for realizing nonvolatile digital memory. Inspired by the recently discovered room-temperature ferroelectricity in $I\phantom{\rule{0}{0ex}}V\ensuremath{-}V\phantom{\rule{0}{0ex}}I$ semiconductor thin films, the authors study electron tunneling in such thin films and propose a type of random-access memory that they call the ``in-plane ferroelectric tunnel junction''. Apart from nonvolatility and lower power consumption and faster writing than with traditional dynamic memories, their proposed system has the advantage of a faster and nondestructive reading process, thus overcoming the write-after-read problem of present-day ferroelectric memories.