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Updated: May 10, 2026

Silicon Metal-oxide-semiconductor Quantum Dots for Single-electron Pumping
Published on: June 3, 2015
CMOS-compatible ferroelectric tunnel junctions integrate stochastic sampling and deterministic computing for image
Ryun-Han Koo1, Jonghyun Ko1, Wonjun Shin2
1Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Inter-university Semiconductor Research Center, Seoul National University, Seoul, Republic of Korea.
None:
Recent progress in generative modeling has intensified the need for compact, energy-efficient hardware platforms. Yet, implementing image generation directly in hardware remains challenging due to the conflicting requirements of stochastic latent space sampling and deterministic decoding. Here, we show a unified hardware framework based on hafnium-oxide ferroelectric tunnel junctions (FTJs) that intrinsically support both functionalities within a single device array. Leveraging the CMOS- and VLSI-compatible fabrication of hafnia ferroelectrics, we realize dual-mode operation: random telegraph noise generation for controllable stochastic sampling, and high-fidelity vector-matrix multiplication enabled by non-volatile multi-level conductance states. Voltage and sampling-time tuning provide fine control over randomness and reliability, enabling high-quality image generation for tasks such as handwritten digit synthesis (MNIST) and high-resolution facial image generation (CelebA). Circuit-level demonstrations confirm stable performance over 105 cycles, surpassing prior hardware-based approaches and illustrating a viable route toward scalable, on-chip generative AI accelerators.
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