April 9, 2015
The research group from the National Polytechnic University of Armenia (NPUA) headed by Dr. Norair Martirosyan (Chair of Microelectronics and Biomedical Devices, Faculty of Cybernetics, NPUA) has successfully started a long term experimental program on the AREAL facility in the framework of the project «Improvement of Ferroelectric Nano-film Characteristics by the AREAL Electron Beam Irradiation». The purpose of this research is to improve the characteristics (frequency performance, dielectric permittivity, residual polarization) of multifunctional ferroelectric nano-films that are important for the development of functional microelectronics and nanotechnology.
In ferroelectric materials there exist oxygen vacancies, which show a “donor”-like behavior and the corresponding trap level energy lies in the forbidden region near the conductance band and not all trap levels are occupied. Therefore, the part of electrons can be trapped by those levels due to irradiation of films by electron beam. This can result in an improvement of the film effective dielectric permittivity, residual polarization, electrical tunability, operating frequencies, as well as the fatigue properties that are important for memory applications.