50-fold endurance improvement in HfO₂-based ferroelectric capacitor through hybrid recovery schemes

Abstract The recovery operation aims to recover the remnant polarization (2P r ) of the HfO 2 -based ferroelectric capacitor. The traditional bipolar recovery scheme can effectively recover 2P r but tends to cause device breakdown, while the unipolar scheme reduces breakdown but does not adequately restore 2P r . To address this trade-off, we propose a hybrid recovery scheme by investigating the electrical cycling behavior to simultaneously restore 2P r and obtain a prolonged dielectric lifetime. Two metrics, the symmetry and reversal ratio are used to optimize the hybrid recovery scheme, which achieves the optimal test parameters of 1/99 and 2%, respectively. The prolonged dielectric lifetime of the hybrid scheme is due to the limited hot atom damage achieved by a lower reversal ratio, and the enhanced recovery performance is attributed to the depinning effect assisted by polarization reversals. Based on the optimized scheme, the endurance is estimated to be 5 × 10 11 , showing a 50-fold improvement compared to conventional recovery schemes.