Ferroelectric capacitor

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Ferroelectric capacitor is a capacitor based on a ferroelectric material. In contrast, traditional capactors are based on dielectric materials. Ferroelectric devices are used in digital electronics as part of ferroelectric RAM, or in analog electronics as tunable capacitors.

In memory applications, the stored value of a ferroelectric capacitor is read by applying an electric field. The amount of charge needed to flip the memory cell to the opposite state is measured and the previous state of the cell is revealed. This means that the read operation destroys the memory cell state, and has to be followed by a corresponding write operation, in order to write the bit back. This makes it similar to the ferrite core memory. The requirement for a write cycle for each read cycle, together with the high but not infinite write cycle limit, poses a potential problem for some special applications.