VLPred: Accelerated Endurance Prediction Platform enabled by AI Surrogates
We present a fully integrated AI-driven framework for rapid endurance prediction in NVDRAM ferroelectric capacitors. Endurance testing is one of the most time- and resource-intensive steps in memory characterization, often requiring up to 10¹<sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> cycles per device. To overcome the scarcity of endurance training data, we propose an experimentally calibrated synthetic data generation pipeline using kinetic Monte Carlo (kMC) simulations in Ginestra™, seeded with experimentally extracted defect parameters. We train a transformer-based AI surrogate using this high-fidelity dataset, achieving an R<sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> of 0.992 and enabling ~10<sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">5</sup>x speedup in defect evolution prediction. The surrogate generates large-scale synthetic datasets by sampling initial defect profiles, which are then used to train a hybrid multi-layer perceptron (MLP)-attention model that maps early-life defect characteristics to Weibull endurance distributions. This final endurance prediction model achieves strong agreement with ground truth Weibull parameters, with R<sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> values of >0.98 for η and ~0.9 for β, demonstrating its reliability in capturing endurance distribution characteristics. Wafer-scale prediction of breakdown distributions is demonstrated in one-shot, reducing characterization time by over 10 orders of magnitude. This framework enables scalable, high-throughput reliability screening for ferroelectric memory technologies.
Authors
- Luca Larcher
- Enrico Piccinini (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6975-5872)
- Gaurav Thareja
- Sheel Nidhan (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0433-6129)
- Kaustubh Tangsali
- Priyankka Gundlapudi Ravikumar (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7454-9088)
- Surya Kalidindi
- King C. Li
- Zekai Wang
- Prasanna Venkatesan
- Yiyi Wang
- Hari Jayasankar
- Suman Datta
- Andrea Padovani
- Janaki Vamaraju
- Ram Cherukuri
- Asif Khan
- Mohammad Nabian
- Prakhar Mathur
- Khandekar Akif Aabrar
- Riccardo Foiera
- Roman Gafiteanu
Institutions
- Georgia Institute of Technology (US)
- UniCredit (Italy) (IT)
- Applied Materials (United States) (US)
- Nvidia (United States) (US)
Publication Details
- Published
- 2025-12-06
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1109/iedm50572.2025.11353672
- Primary Topic
- Ferroelectric and Negative Capacitance Devices
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00