Temperature Dependence and Temperature-Aware Sensing in Ferroelectric FET

The temperature dependence of Ferroelectric FET (FeFET) at the 14nm technology node has been studied thoroughly through well-calibrated TCAD modeling for 3D FinFET devices. We demonstrate, for the first time, that: 1) the degradation of FeFET (i.e., reduction in sensing current during reading) with temperature increase comes mostly from the ferroelectric degradation (i.e., reductions in the coercive field and polarization), while marginally from the degradation in the underlying FinFET (i.e. changes in electrostatics and carrier transport properties); 2) the drain current reduction caused by the ferroelectric degradation can be partially compensated with the current boost induced by the degradation in electrostatics and carrier transport properties. Therefore, the read voltage of FeFET based nonvolatile memory (NVM) can be carefully selected to mitigate deleterious effects of temperature variation during runtime.