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

降低功耗是无线移动计算行业延长电池寿命和改善终端用户体验(例如，使用智能手机和平板电脑)的持续目标。因此，了解和开发可降低功耗的技术对高通加拿大公司保持其作为无线射频(RF)应用产品解决方案的世界领先供应商的优势至关重要。一种可能的解决方案是使用铁电电容器来产生“负电容”，以提高开关速度和降低晶体管的功耗。 使用铁电材料改善晶体管性能的工作仅限于最初的想法本身和初步的实验验证。此外，到目前为止，工作的重点是数字性能，而没有研究模拟射频应用的可能改进。高通试图了解铁电材料是否真的可以提供更高的性能和/或更低的功耗，因为它对未来的产品具有战略重要性。铁电材料是一种特别有希望的改进途径，因为铁电场效应晶体管可以用现有的制造方法制造，只需很少的修改。 高通的硬件和软件举措有赖于它们利用现有的最尖端芯片技术。因此，了解和利用铁电等新兴技术带来的功耗和性能收益与高通保持其无线移动行业市场领先者的地位直接相关。此外，拟议的工作将有助于培养高素质的人才(HQP)，他们是尖端半导体器件和电路技术的专家。这样的HQP对加拿大高科技公司保持全球优势至关重要。

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.