Nonvolatile and Volatile Memory Fusion of Antiferroelectric-like Hafnium–Zirconium Oxide for Multi-Bit Access and Endurance >10¹² Cycles by Alternating Polarity Cycling Recovery and Spatially Resolved Evolution

The fusion of volatile and nonvolatile memory within a complementary-dynamic random-access memory (C-DRAM) in one cell is proposed with antiferroelectric-like hafnium-zirconium oxide with dual function characteristics of DRAM and storage class memory in the memory hierarchy. Atomic-resolution spherical aberration-corrected scanning transmission electron microscopy is employed to directly reveal the insights of phase evolution by utilizing diffractograms to determine lattice parameters. Storage-data-transfer-cycling-recovery with an alternating access scheme is introduced due to the characteristic of independent domains to exhibit multilevel states. Remanent polarization (<i>P</i>_r) can be restored, and 34 periods (3 × 10¹⁰ cycles/period) to accumulate 1.02 × 10¹² switching cycles are demonstrated. The proposed method is effective in prolonging the endurance and evaluating the spatially resolved evolution of polarization.