Highly Reliable and High-Yield 1.2V HfZrO_x FRAM and its Physical Origin via Micrometer-Scale Nanocrystalline Domain Analysis

A highly reliable HfZrOx FRAM technology has been achieved with the endurance of up to 10¹² cycles at 85°C with ±1.2V. 256 kb 1T1C FRAM chips with 8nm and 6nm HfZrOx exhibit a 100% 8kb-yield without wake-up (84% of chips) and with a 400 μs wake-up pulse at room temperature, respectively. An operation speed of 20ns at ±1.2V is demonstrated in the Shmoo plot. The robust high-temperature reliability and high-yield arrays are achieved through a solid understanding of over-optimistic 2Pr and transmission Kikuchi diffraction (TKD) for micrometer-scale nanocrystalline crystal domain inspection. This work suggests a viable scaling path and improves the performance of HfZrOx FRAM technology.