Flexible Quasi-van der Waals Ferroelectric Hafnium-Based Oxide for Integrated High-Performance Nonvolatile Memory

Ferroelectric memories with ultralow-power-consumption are attracting a great deal of interest with the ever-increasing demand for information storage in wearable electronics. However, sufficient scalability, semiconducting compatibility, and robust flexibility of the ferroelectric memories remain great challenges, e.g., owing to Pb-containing materials, oxide electrode, and limited thermal stability. Here, high-performance flexible nonvolatile memories based on ferroelectric Hf_0.5Zr_0.5O₂ (HZO) via quasi-van der Waals heteroepitaxy are reported. The flexible ferroelectric HZO exhibits not only high remanent polarization up to 32.6 µC cm^-2 without a wake-up effect during cycling, but also remarkably robust mechanical properties, degradation-free retention, and endurance performance under a series of bent deformations and cycling tests. Intriguingly, using HZO as a gate, flexible ferroelectric thin-film transistors with a low operating voltage of ±3 V, high on/off ratio of 6.5  ×  10⁵, and a small subthreshold slope of about 100 mV dec^-1, which outperform reported flexible ferroelectric transistors, are demonstrated. The results make ferroelectric HZO a promising candidate for the next-generation of wearable, low-power, and nonvolatile memories with manufacturability and scalability.