Project description
How tiny electric patterns could lead to more energy-efficient electronic devices
Ferroelectric materials are special because they can hold electric polarisation, rendering them useful for memory and electronic devices. Recently, scientists discovered new, tiny polar patterns in these materials (vortices, skyrmions) that could lead to ultra-compact and energy-efficient devices. However, these patterns have only been studied on special oxide substrates and not on silicon, which is the foundation of most modern electronics. The ERC-funded LUCIOLE project aims to bring these advanced ferroelectric textures to silicon. Researchers will use advanced techniques such as molecular beam epitaxy and will leverage semiconductor technologies to grow and control these textures. The proposed research will explore how these patterns can be stabilised on silicon and how they behave under an electric field, leading to the development of next-generation electronic devices.
Objective
Ferroelectric materials have been known, and their fascinating properties exploited for more than 100 years. Still, in recent years, exotic polar textures resembling those found in magnetic materials have been unraveled in nanoscale ferroelectric perovskite oxides, such as flux closure domains, curling polarization, vortices, and the groundbreaking discoveries of polar skyrmions and merons in 2019/2020. Polar textures hold huge promise for novel robust topological electronic devices such as ultra-compact (> Tbit/in2) memories. However, so far, nanoscale polar domains have only been studied on special oxide substrates (e.g. SrTiO3), which precludes practical applications. I propose to take a revolutionary approach to the field of topological polar textures by bringing them to the realm of the Si platform. Not only is this necessary to implement energy-efficient nanodevices, but Si material and advanced CMOS semiconductor technologies offer multiple unexplored ways to engineer mechanical and electrical boundary conditions in ultrathin films and nanostructures of transition metal oxides.
With LUCIOLE, I will push the limits in the exploration and future harnessing of emergent states in ferroics with the following objectives:
- Create monolithically-integrated topological polar textures on silicon by molecular beam epitaxy and atomic layer deposition of epitaxial and glass-composite nanoscale ferroelectrics using strain, confinement and frustration engineering.
- Understand the polar textures created on silicon by combining advanced state-of-the-art correlative microscopies and spectroscopies at the nanoscale, including operando time-resolved methods.
- Integrate ferroelectrics at the nanoscale at the front-end- and back-end-of-line of Si chips in sub-500 nm two- and three-terminal devices with tunable stress and study their manipulation under electric field by statistically screening their properties at the wafer scale to unveil potentially rich behavioral patterns.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- natural sciences physical sciences optics microscopy
- natural sciences physical sciences electromagnetism and electronics semiconductivity
- natural sciences chemical sciences inorganic chemistry metalloids
- natural sciences physical sciences optics spectroscopy
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
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Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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Call for proposal
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(opens in new window) ERC-2022-ADG
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14109 Berlin
Germany
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