IEICE Transactions on Electronics
Online ISSN : 1745-1353
Print ISSN : 0916-8524
Special Section on Low-Leakage, Low-Voltage, Low-Power and High-Speed Technologies for System LSIs in Deep-Submicron Era
A Dependable SRAM with 7T/14T Memory Cells
Hidehiro FUJIWARAShunsuke OKUMURAYusuke IGUCHIHiroki NOGUCHIHiroshi KAWAGUCHIMasahiko YOSHIMOTO
Author information
JOURNAL RESTRICTED ACCESS

2009 Volume E92.C Issue 4 Pages 423-432

Details
Abstract

This paper proposes a novel dependable SRAM with 7T/14T memory cells, and introduces a new concept, “quality of a bit (QoB)” for it. The proposed SRAM has three modes: a normal mode, high-speed mode, and dependable mode, and dynamically scales its reliability, power and speed by combining two memory cells for one-bit information (i.e. 14T/bit). By carrying out Monte Carlo simulation in a 65-nm process technology, the minimum voltages in read and write operations are improved by 0.21V and 0.26V, respectively, with a bit error rate of 10-8 kept. In addition, we confirm that the dependable mode achieves a lower bit error rate than the error correction code (ECC) and multi module redundancy (MMR). Furthermore, we propose a new memory array structure to avoid the half-selection problem in a write operation. The respective cell area overheads in the normal mode are 26% and 11% in the cases where additional transistors are pMOSes and nMOSes, compared to the conventional 6T memory cell.

Content from these authors
© 2009 The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers
Previous article Next article
feedback
Top