Epitaxial integration of tetragonal BiFeO3 with silicon for nonvolatile memory applications

Ferroelectric field-effect transistor has long been considered as a promising nonvolatile memory technology, but its application is limited by the poor scalability. Here we show that this problem can be solved by epitaxially integrating tetragonal BiFeO3, a stress-induced metastable phase which exhibits remarkably low dielectric permittivity and high coercive field, on the silicon platform. Tetragonal BiFeO3 was stabilized on (001)-oriented silicon by using Bi2SiO5, which is chemically and structurally compatible with both silicon and tetragonal BiFeO3, as the buffer layer. Unlike the commonly observed MC structure, the obtained BiFeO3 layer exhibits a true tetragonal symmetry. An unprecedented high memory window of 6.5 V was observed for the Au/BiFeO3/Bi2SiO5/Si capacitor with BiFeO3 thickness of 135 nm. The epitaxial integration of tetragonal BiFeO3 with silicon may pave a possible avenue for nanosized, power-efficient ferroelectric nonvolatile memories.