FE-FETs contain gate insulators made of ferroelectric materials that can both switch and store electrical charge. In addition to regulating the current flow in electronic devices like conventional FETs, therefore, these ferroelectric-based transistors could also serve as memory devices.

This dual function could be highly advantageous for computationally demanding applications, such as running artificial intelligence (AI) models, as it could allow devices to better support their operation without consuming too much power. Despite their potential, FE-FETs have not yet been introduced on a large-scale, partly because reliably fabricating them on a large-scale using existing processes has proved to be challenging.

Researchers at University of Pennsylvania, Penn State University, and other universities worldwide recently introduced a strategy to create FE-FETs using similar processes to those currently employed to produce FETs. Their paper, published in Nature Nanotechnology, could pave the way toward the widespread adoption of these dual-function transistors.

"The main motivation behind our study was to demonstrate that both 2D semiconductor materials such as MoS₂ and nitride ferroelectrics like AlScN (i.e., aluminum scandium nitride) are very attractive for realizing compact, low-power and fast non-volatile memory devices that can be directly integrated on Si CMOS technology in a back end of line (BEOL) process," Deep Jariwala, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told Phys.org. "We have been looking at 2D materials and AlScN for this application for some time now. Our present paper is a tour de force demonstration of materials scaled up to large areas and devices scaled down to very small dimensions and operating voltages."