  The ferroelectric material is an important platform to realize non-volatile
memories. So far, existing ferroelectric memory devices utilize out-of-plane
polarization in ferroelectric thin films. In this paper, we propose a new type
of random-access memory (RAM) based on ferroelectric thin films with the
in-plane polarization called "in-plane ferroelectric tunnel junction". Apart
from non-volatility, lower power usage and faster writing operation compared
with traditional dynamic RAMs, our proposal has the advantage of faster reading
operation and non-destructive reading process, thus overcomes the
write-after-read problem that widely exists in current ferroelectric RAMs. The
recent discovered room-temperature ferroelectric IV-VI semiconductor thin films
is a promising material platform to realize our proposal.
