On November 6 2018, Prof. Suman Datta from University of Notre Dame visited the Institute of Microelectronics of Chinese Academy of Sciences (IMECAS). He delivered a lecture entitled “From Ferroelectrics to Ferroelectronics” in IMECAS hosted by Prof. Ling Li. More than 40 local professionals and graduate students attended the meeting. Research discovery of ferroelectricity in doped hafnium dioxide thin films has ignited tremendous activity in exploration of ferroelectric FETs for a range of applications from low-power logic to embedded non-volatile memory to in-memory compute kernels. In this talk, Prof. Datta presented key milestones in the evolution of Ferroelectric Field Effect Transistors (FeFETs) and the emergence of a versatile Ferroelectronic platform. Prof. Datta began with a critical review of steep slope FeFETs for logic applications. Nonvolatile memory in logic circuits (such as non-volatile flip flops and SRAM) using FeFETs had been discussed in the context of incidental or intermittent computing targeted for extremely energy constrained applications. Next, Prof. Datta discussed the application of FeFETs as an analog multi-level weight storage and weight update unit for accelerating in-situ hardware training for deep neural networks. At last, Prof. Datta concluded with his current understanding of the physics of multi-domain switching in doped HfO2 thin films, and its significance for various ferroelectronic applications. After the lecture, a symposium was held with the participating researchers from the IMECAS, both sides introduced their recent works and had a heated discussion.  Prof. Datta was giving a talk. |
