Ferroelectric gas sensors for edge intelligence

초록

Gas sensors are poised to become ubiquitous front ends for edge intelligence, yet today’s dominant semiconducting platforms remain constrained by fixed functionality, thermal power budgets, and vulnerability to environmental drift. Here we review how ferroelectrics reframe gas sensing by introducing switchable polarization as a programmable handle over interfacial electrostatics, defect chemistry, and adsorption energetics. We synthesize progress across perovskite oxides, van der Waals (vdW) ferroelectrics, and fluorite thin films, emphasizing the mechanistic links between ferroelectric polarization and gas-sensing response, reconfigurability, and device operation. Furthermore, we highlight device architectures that translate these mechanisms into scalable technologies and discuss reliability considerations such as retention, endurance, wake-up, and thermal instability that govern practical operation. Finally, we place ferroelectric gas sensors in a broader system context, showing how intrinsic piezoelectric, pyroelectric, and photoactive couplings can be co-designed with on-chip energy storage/harvesting to realize multimodal, energy-autonomous sensor nodes. These attributes make ferroelectric sensor platforms inherently aligned with edge deployment, where calibration, context-awareness, and power management must be performed locally. By consolidating materials-level principles with integration pathways, this review outlines design rules and open challenges for deploying ferroelectric polarization as a unifying strategy for next-generation adaptive gas-sensing platforms.

키워드