Exploration of Ferroelectric Materials and Negative Capacitance Effect for Next-Generation Chips Used in Wireless Mobile Products

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Reduced power consumption is an ongoing goal of the wireless mobile-computing industry to extend battery life and improve end-user experience (e.g., with smartphones and tablets). Understanding and exploiting techniques that may yield reduced power consumption is thus of vital interest to Qualcomm Canada, Inc. to maintain its edge as a world-leading supplier of product solutions for wireless radio-frequency (RF) applications. One possible solution is the use of ferroelectric capacitors to create "negative capacitance" to increase the switching speed and reduce the power consumption of transistors. Work on the use of ferroelectrics for improved transistor performance has been limited to the initial idea itself and preliminary experimental validation. In addition, work to date has focused on digital performance, with no work done on studying possible improvements for analog RF applications. Qualcomm seeks to know whether ferroelectrics can indeed offer improved performance and/or reduced power consumption as it is of strategic importance for future products. Ferroelectric materials are a particularly promising avenue of improvement, since ferroelectric field-effect transistors can be made using existing fabrication methods with very little modification. The hardware and software initiatives of Qualcomm depend on them exploiting the most leading-edge chip technologies available. Understanding and leveraging power-consumption and performance gains facilitated by emerging technologies such as ferroelectrics is thus of direct relevance to Qualcomm in maintaining its position as a market leader in the wireless mobile industry. In addition, the proposed work will contribute to the creation of highly qualified personnel (HQP) that are experts in leading-edge semiconductor-device and circuit technologies. Such HQP are vital for Canadian high-technology firms to retain their global edge.