Research status and future prospects of hafnium oxide-based ferroelectric field-effect transistors

With the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence technology, the scale of data to be processed by computers is growing exponentially, imposing increasingly stringent demands on the performance of computer hardware storage. The read and write speeds of conventional flash memory can no longer match the computing speed of central processing units (CPUs), creating the "memory wall" bottleneck that severely limits further improvements in computing performance. Meanwhile, the trend toward mobile and portable high-end consumer electronics has raised increasingly stringent hardware requirements, particularly for ultra-low-power operation, high integration density, and cost-effective data storage solutions. Since the discovery of ferroelectricity in doped hafnium oxide (HfO₂) thin films, HfO₂-based ferroelectric materials have attracted considerable attention in the device engineering community. Owing to the excellent compatibility and scalability of HfO₂ thin films with modern semiconductor manufacturing processes, ferroelectric field-effect transistors (FeFETs) have re-emerged as a key focus in advanced microelectronics, becoming a key candidate device for breaking through the performance bottlenecks of traditional memory and overcoming the "Memory Wall" dilemma. This paper focuses on the application of FeFETs in non-volatile memory, systematically elaborates on their basic operating principles, and deeply investigates the influence laws of doping effects, annealing processes, cooling rates and other factors on the ferroelectric properties of hafnium oxide thin films. Aiming at the reliability issues of FeFETs, particular emphasis is placed on analyzing the mechanisms and strategies for enhancing critical device performance metrics, such as memory window, endurance, and data retention time. Furthermore, this paper briefly reviews the latest research progress of FeFETs in terms of material optimization (such as hybrid ferroelectric layers and novel high-k interlayers) and structural innovation (such as indium-gallium-zinc oxide based FeFETs). Finally, the future development of FeFETs is prospected, indicating that hafnium oxide-based FeFETs hold important commercial application prospects in the fields of embedded non-volatile memory, neuromorphic computing, high-density storage and so on, and are expected to become the core component of the next-generation microelectronic memory devices.