Bottom-up Approach for Generating Regular Patterns of Nanoscaled Ferroelectric Perovskites

Ferroelectric materials are of growing interest in international research and development. Special attention is drawn to the integration of ferroelectric materials in non-volatile random access memory cells (FeRAMs). For future high-density FeRAMs, the scaling of the size of ferroelectric structures needs to be understood in order to elucidate possible limitations to memory densities. Various experimental studies were carried out in order to investigate scaling effects of ferroelectric nanograins on Si-wafers [1-4]. A major drawback of top-down approaches is the difficulty to achieve ferroelectric structures with lateral dimensions well below 50 nm. In addition, erosive top-down approaches [1, 3] inevitably induce damage to the fabricated capacitors as ferroelectricity is a nature of the crystal lattice. Hence, it becomes hard to distinguish between real intrinsic ferroelectric properties and the impact of production steps.