In-Plane Ferroelectric Tunnel Junction

The ferroelectric material is an important platform to realize non-volatile memories. So far, existing ferroelectric memory devices utilize out-of-plane polarization in ferroelectric thin films. In this paper, we propose a new type of random-access memory (RAM) based on ferroelectric thin films with the in-plane polarization called "in-plane ferroelectric tunnel junction". Apart from non-volatility, lower power usage and faster writing operation compared with traditional dynamic RAMs, our proposal has the advantage of faster reading operation and non-destructive reading process, thus overcomes the write-after-read problem that widely exists in current ferroelectric RAMs. The recent discovered room-temperature ferroelectric IV-VI semiconductor thin films is a promising material platform to realize our proposal.