Nanoscale Ferroelectrics: Fundamentals and Featured Applications
Igor A. Lukyanchuk,
Université de Picardie Jules Verne, France
The miniaturization of semiconductor devices is rapidly approaching its fundamental physical limits, with energy dissipation becoming a critical bottleneck for modern electronics. In this talk, a broad overview of nanoscale ferroelectrics will be presented, highlighting their disruptive potential to overcome the barriers of traditional silicon technologies and drive next-generation computing architectures. The presentation will first explore the fundamental physics of ferroelectrics at the nanoscale, focusing on the emergence of complex topological structures, such as switchable chiral domains, skyrmions, vortices, and hopfions, and the advanced capability to reversibly control their chirality. Building upon these physical principles, we will discuss the recent technological achievements across three key application scenarios. First, we will show how harnessing the dynamics of topological domain walls provides a stable negative capacitance, successfully breaking the traditional subthreshold swing limits of field-effect transistors. Second, moving beyond standard binary architectures, we will introduce the concept of ultra-dense multi-value logic and memory devices based on arrays of ferroelectric nanodots. Finally, we will present the highly efficient hardware reservoirs for neuromorphic computing that exploit nonlinear polarization dynamics for low-power temporal data processing. Together, these innovations outline a robust and versatile foundation for the future of energy-efficient micro- and nanotechnologies.