Physics-informed AI Accelerated Retention Analysis of Ferroelectric Vertical NAND: From Day-Scale TCAD to Second-Scale Surrogate Model
This work addresses the computational bottleneck of TCAD simulations for optimizing 3D Fe-VNAND retention, offering a fast and accurate surrogate model for device design.
The authors developed a Physics-Informed Neural Operator (PINO) surrogate model to predict threshold voltage shifts and retention behavior in Fe-VNAND devices, achieving over 10,000x speedup compared to TCAD while maintaining physical accuracy.
Ferroelectric field-effect transistors (FeFET)-based vertical NAND (Fe-VNAND) has emerged as a promising candidate to overcome z-scaling limitations with lower programming voltages. However, the data retention of 3D Fe-VNAND is hindered by the complex interaction between charge detrapping and ferroelectric depolarization. Developing optimized device designs requires exploring an extensive parameter space, but the high computational cost of conventional Technology Computer-Aided Design (TCAD) tools makes such wide-scale optimization impractical. To overcome these simulation barriers, we present a Physics-Informed Neural Operator (PINO)-based AI surrogate model designed for high-efficiency prediction of threshold voltage (Vth) shifts and retention behavior. By embedding fundamental physical principles into the learning architecture, our PINO framework achieves a speedup exceeding 10000x compared to TCAD while maintaining physical accuracy. This study demonstrates the model's effectiveness on a single FeFET configuration, serving as a pathway toward modeling the retention loss mechanisms.