About us

NaMLab was founded in 2006 as a public private partnership between Qimonda Dresden GmbH and TU Dresden. In the first year, NaMLab started as a research organization with 10 employees focused on material research for future memory devices. The company steadily expanded and today, NaMLab serves a growing list of world-wide partners. NaMLab´s research is contributing to the main challenges for our future society with respect to climate change, digitalization and mobility by placing sustainable, secure and intelligent electronic solutions into the core focus. With respect to the technical areas those solutions can be divided into three main activities:

• Dielectrics for Semiconductor Devices,
• Reconfigurable Devices and
• Energy Efficiency Devices

This seventh bi-annual report covers the NaMLab activities in the two-year period 2022 and 2023. The timeframe was influenced by the Attack of Russia on Ukraine. Especially the rising and not predictable costs for electrical power, district heat, and materials like liquid Nitrogen in conjunction with the overall high inflation rate have been a strong burden for a research organization having a cleanroom and working on semiconductor technology. Once again, the team met the challenge with great success. Programs to reduce power consumption and consumables were put in place. By this the institute could continue its path as a world leading organization in the field of material research for future electron devices. The level of international attention has further increased as visible by invitations to world leading conferences.

NaMLab´s research in the field of dielectrics is focused on novel and semiconductor compatible ferroelectric materials, such as hafnium oxide and aluminum scandium nitride, and their application in capacitors. Understanding the most important factors that control ferroelectricity, as well as understanding the degradation mechanism of such ferroelectric materials was a focus of the research in the reporting period. As an example of a highlight, the advanced material stacks were successfully integrated into a 1T-1C FeRAM demonstrator using a 3D capacitor . This shows the strong relation between materials research on dielectrics and the device oriented topics NaMLab has achieved.

All three reconfigurable device concepts explored at NaMLab are currently under consideration for applications in both intelligent self-learning electronics as well as electronics with a higher inherent security.

In a reconfigurable field effect transistor (RFET), the polarity of a field effect device can be controlled by applying a gate voltage to a dedicated programming gate. In the reporting period, the team, together with an industrial partner, was able to demonstrate a first RFET device integrated into a state of the art CMOS technology. It was shown that a reconfigurable analog function is possible with only minor modifications of the standard CMOS integration process. Moreover, the path towards applications in hardware security was further extended.
The second topic in reconfigurable devices is field effect transistors based on ferroelectric hafnium oxide. Together with partners from Fraunhofer IPMS-CNT and GlobalFoundries, NaMLab is pushing this concept since 2009.

On this topic in the reporting period, NaMLab continued by working with GlobalFoundries and the NaMLab Spin-Off Ferroelectric Memory GmbH on developing the embedded FeFET technology at GlobalFoundries. Applications of ferroelectric hafnium oxide beyond semiconductor memories like neuromorphic computing and memory-in logic devices were a focus point. Moreover, the work on ferroelectric tunneling junctions (FTJ) to realize artificial synapses have become more important with new EU projects coming on-line.
The third major reconfigurable device concept explored is resistive switching. Here, analog resistive switching as well as memcapacitance was pushed further and together with partners of TU Dresden a new concept of a neurotransistor was proposed and a project to realize it experimentally was started.
The field of energy efficiency devices had three key topics, namely solar cells, batteries and GaN materials and devices in the past. All three research activities aim on providing sustainable electronic solutions. The solar cell and battery activities were not continued in the reporting period. For solar cells this was caused by the overall situation of solar industry in Germany. In the field of batteries the focus of research has shifted away from nanowire-based anodes, which have been the main focus of research at NaMLab
In the field of gallium nitride materials and devices at the outpost in Freiberg, together with its industrial partner NaMLab was able to further enhance the quality and reproducibility of crack-free doped HVPE GaN crystals and the scaling-up of wafer diameter was initiated. IIWith the MBE activities high quality films reflecting the understanding of the emergence and the impact of remaining impurities was further improved. These activities have been hit by the attack of Russia on Ukraine since the very fruitful collaboration with the Russian partner had to be stopped. As a new activity in the field of GaN devices, research combining NaMLabs know how on ferroelectrics with GaN transistor technology was started.
In summary, despite the complicated boundary conditions induced by the attack of Russia on Ukraine, NaMLab further strengthen its position in the core topics in the reporting period, contributing to the grand challenges of our modern society. This is documented in the increasing number of partnerships with local and international industrial and research partners. Another impressive increase of citations of NaMLab’s scientific publications as well as a large number of invitations to leading scientific conferences like IRPS, ISAF, EDTM, IEDM, VLSI-TSA document the high international visibility NaMLab has now achieved and maintained. The NaMLab team will built on the strong results accomplished in this reporting period and further extend its efforts to continuously contribute to shape the exciting and challenging world of micro- and nanoelectronics.

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Download Annual Report 2021/2022