Article,

Process Variation and Radiation-Immune Single Ended 6T SRAM Cell

, and .
ACEEE International Journal on Signal & Image Processing, 1 (3): 9 (December 2010)

Abstract

The leakage power can dominate the system power dissipation and determine the battery life in battery-operated applications with low duty cycles, such as the wireless sensors, cellular phones, PDAs or pacemakers. Driven by the need of ultra-low power applications, this paper presents single ended 6T SRAM (static random access memory) cell which is also radiation hardened due to maximum use of PMOS transistors. Due to process imperfection, starting from the 65 nm technology node, device scaling no longer delivers the power gains. Since then the supply voltage has remained almost constant and improvement in dynamic power has stagnated, while the leakage currents have continued to increase. Therefore, power reduction is the major area of concern in today’s circuit with minimum-geometry devices such as nanoscale memories. The proposed design in this paper saves dynamic write power more than 50%. It also offers 29.7% improvement in TWA (write access time), 38.5% improvement in WPWR (write power), 69.6% improvement in WEDP (write energy delay product), 26.3% improvement in WEDP variability, 5.6% improvement in RPWR (read power) at the cost of 22.5% penalty in SNM (static noise margin) at nominal voltage of VDD = 1 V. The tighter spread in write EDP implies its robustness against process and temperature variations. Monte Carlo simulation measurements validate the design at 32 nm technology node

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