Breakthrough in Ferroelectric Materials Research

TapTechNews on June 12, a research article titled "Developing fatigue-resistant ferroelectrics using interlayer sliding switching" was published in the international academic journal Science on June 7 by the Flexible Magnetoelectric Functional Materials and Devices Team of the Ningbo Institute of Materials Technology and Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, in conjunction with relevant teams from the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China and Fudan University.

Based on the two-dimensional sliding ferroelectric mechanism, this research has created a fatigue-resistant ferroelectric material, providing a brand new approach to solving the fatigue problem of ferroelectric materials.

According to the Ningbo Institute of Materials Technology and Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, ferroelectric materials are a common type of functional material. Due to the non-coincidence of the positive and negative charge centers in its crystal, an electric dipole moment is generated, thus having the property of self-generated electric polarization and being regulated by an external field. However, traditional ferroelectric materials represented by lead zirconate titanate (PZT), which is most widely used commercially, will experience ferroelectric fatigue during use. That is, as the number of polarizations flipping under the external field increases, the electrode polarization will decrease, resulting in performance attenuation and eventually device failure. Ferroelectric fatigue failure is one of the main causes of equipment failure in various electronic devices worldwide.

With bilayer MoS2 (molybdenum disulfide) two-dimensional material as the representative material, the research team fabricated bilayer MoS2 ferroelectric devices by the chemical vapor transport (CVT) method. It was found that after millions of cycles of electric field flipping polarization, electrical curve measurements indicated that the ferroelectric polarization did not decay, and its fatigue resistance was significantly better than that of traditional ionic ferroelectric materials.

This means that, taking ferroelectric memories as an example, ferroelectric memories fabricated with the new two-dimensional sliding ferroelectric materials have no limit on the number of read and write operations. Therefore, for fields such as deep-sea exploration or major equipment in aerospace, the fatigue-free new two-dimensional layered sliding ferroelectric materials are expected to greatly enhance equipment reliability and reduce maintenance costs.

TapTechNews attaches the link to the paper:

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ado1744