A Reconfigurable Ferroelectric Transistor as An Ultra-Scaled Cell for Low-Power In-Memory Data Processing

Compact in-memory computing architectures are desirable to embed artificial intelligence (AI) in resource-restricted edge devices. However, current technologies face limitations in both the area and energy efficiency. Here, a reconfigurable ferroelectric tunnel field-effect transistor (ferro-TFET) is presented that can be used as an ultra-scaled cell for low-power in-memory data processing. A gate-all-around ferroelectric film is integrated on a vertical nanowire TFET with a gate/source overlapped channel, enabling non-volatilely reconfigurable anti-ambipolarity by programming the ferroelectric polarization state. By considering the stored polarization state and reading voltage as inputs, an XNOR operation is achieved in a single-gate ferro-TFET. It is shown that the ferro-TFETs can be implemented in a crossbar array for convolutional frequency filtering whose performance can be evaluated by an impulse-response method considering the effect of device-to-device variation based on statistics. Benefiting from the miniaturized footprint, non-volatility, and low-power operation, ferro-TFETs show promises as a one-transistor in-memory computing cell for area- and energy-efficient edge AI applications.