Ferroelectric materials are a common functional material, which have the property of self generating polarization and can be controlled by external fields due to the mismatch of positive and negative charge centers in their crystals, resulting in an electric dipole moment. However, traditional ferroelectric materials, represented by the most widely used commercial lead zirconate titanate (PZT), may experience ferroelectric fatigue during use.

Ferroelectric fatigue failure is one of the main causes of failures in various electronic devices worldwide. Especially in recent years, in the fields of major technological equipment such as aerospace and deep-sea exploration, various devices prepared using ferroelectric materials are often used to perform key tasks such as storage, sensing, driving, and energy conversion in complex environments such as high temperature and high pressure, high-frequency vibration, high-
strength magnetic field, and high-strength radiation. Ferroelectric components will gradually experience fatigue failure under repeated external loading. Therefore, optimizing and designing the fatigue resistance characteristics of ferroelectric materials is the basis for ensuring equipment reliability.

To solve the pain of fatigue in ferroelectric materials, Chinese scientists have successfully created a fatigue free ferroelectric material, which is expected to achieve unlimited erasing of memory. This research was jointly created by the Flexible Magnetoelectric Functional Materials and Devices Team of the Ningbo Institute of Materials Technology and Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, in conjunction with relevant teams of the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China and Fudan University.

According to "Ningbo Institute of Materials, Chinese Academy of Sciences", the research team has prepared a fatigue free two-dimensional layered sliding ferroelectric material based on the sliding ferroelectric mechanism. Through theoretical calculations, it has been found that compared to conventional ferroelectric materials, slip ferroelectricity requires a smaller electric field to achieve polarization reversal through interlayer slip, and such a small electric field is not enough to move charged defects. And due to the layered structure of two-dimensional materials, defects are difficult to move across layers, so defects do not aggregate and ferroelectric fatigue does not occur.

Taking memory as an example, ferroelectric memory prepared using a new two-dimensional sliding ferroelectric material has no limit on the number of reads and writes. Therefore, for the field of deep-sea exploration or aerospace major equipment, a new type of fatigue free two-dimensional layered sliding ferroelectric material is expected to greatly improve equipment reliability and reduce maintenance costs.

The operation of AI requires a large amount of computing resources for model training and inference, which requires the use of high-performance computing chips including GPUs (graphics processors), ASICs (application specific integrated circuits), artificial intelligence specific chips, as well as memory chips such as HBMs. With the continuous popularity of AI models and related applications, AI is becoming a major driving force in the global semiconductor industry.