%0 Journal Article
%K Energy consumption
%K Velocity
%K Electric potential
%K Semiconductor
%K Storage
%K Electrode
%K Oxygen
%K Direct current (DC)
%K Polarization
%K Article
%K Memory
%K Photovoltaic system
%K Research work
%K Data storage device
%K Illumination
%K Memory cell
%K Oxygen tension
%K Solid state
%K Ultraviolet radiation
%A R Guo
%A L You
%A Y Zhou
%A Z.S Lim
%A X Zou
%A L Chen
%A Ramamoorthy Ramesh
%A J Wang
%B Nature Communications
%D 2013
%G eng
%R 10.1038/ncomms2990
%T Non-volatile memory based on the ferroelectric
%V 4
%X The quest for a solid state universal memory with high-storage density, high read/write speed, random access and non-volatility has triggered intense research into new materials and novel device architectures. Though the non-volatile memory market is dominated by flash memory now, it has very low operation speed with ∼10 μs programming and ∼10 ms erasing time. Furthermore, it can only withstand ∼105 rewriting cycles, which prevents it from becoming the universal memory. Here we demonstrate that the significant photovoltaic effect of a ferroelectric material, such as BiFeO 3 with a band gap in the visible range, can be used to sense the polarization direction non-destructively in a ferroelectric memory. A prototype 16-cell memory based on the cross-bar architecture has been prepared and tested, demonstrating the feasibility of this technique. © 2013 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved.