We are looking for highly motivated candidates to work on our projects

Internship positions below

contact : nick.barrett@cea.fr

Open internship position

Ferroelectricity in doped HfO2 thin films under appropriate strain and annealing conditions was reported for the first time 10 years ago generating strong interest in the non-volatile memory community [Boescke2011].

Thanks to CMOS compatibility and potential for scaling and 3D integration, it is not only a breakthrough with respect to conventional perovskite-based ferroelectric (FE) devices but also a revolution from an application prospective [Mikolajick2021].

Compared to technologies like Flash or resistive, phase change and magnetic memories, FE memories are intrinsically low power: reversing the electrical polarization which encodes the information is three orders of magnitude more energy efficient than the nearest competitors.

However, increasing the technological maturity requires understanding the influence of dopants and defects on device performance.

We will use advanced operando materials characterization to trace a path for device optimization by fundamental materials engineering.

The internship work will be done in close collaboration (https://www.3eferro.eu/) between laboratories of the CEA Research and Tech divisions, respectively, IRAMIS/SPEC/LENSIS (https://www.lensislab.com/) and LETI/DCOS/S3C/LDMC.

X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy in laboratory and possibly synchrotron environments will be used to probe the interface chemistry, electronic structure and oxygen vacancy concentration as a function of operational cycling [Hamouda2020], to be correlated with the electrical characteristics.

The successful internship work will give rise to an already funded PhD thesis at the forefront of this crucial field for low power electronics.

References

[Boescke2011] T. S. Böscke et al., Appl. Phys. Lett. 99, 102903 (2011).

[Francois2021] T. Francois et al., IEDM 2021 Trans. Electron Devices 2022

[Mikolajick2021] T. Mikolajick, U. Schroeder, M.H. Park, Appl. Phys. Lett. 118, 180402 (2021)

[Hamouda2020] W. Hamouda et al., J. Appl. Phys. 127, 064105 (2020)

Application & CV to nick.barrett@cea.fr