As the IC process technology scales, the oxide thickness and operating voltage continues to decrease. The gate oxide thickness in recent and future IC process technology has approached the limit when direct tunneling causes gate leakage in both on state and off state of MOSFET transistor operation modes. Also, lower operating voltage will lower the stability of SRAM cell resulting in lower value of static noise margin. In this paper, a novel read '0' static noise margin (SNM) free eight transistors (8T) SRAM cell is proposed that reduces gate leakage power in the zero state, taking into consideration the fact that in ordinary program most of the bits stored in caches are zeros for both the data and instruction streams. Compared to conventional six transistors (6T) SRAM cell, new 8T SRAM cell reduces total leakage by 50.2% in the zero state at low temperature, where gate leakage is dominant. High V T transistors in 8T SRAM cell can be used to further reduce both gate and sub threshold leakage. This new high V T 8T SRAM cell reduces total leakage by 60% in zero state at highest temperature. The 8T SRAM cell is SNM free in read operation for the case when cell stores logic '0'. Interestingly, new cell improves SNM by 2.2 times as compared to conventional 6T SRAM cell in read operation and standby mode for the case when cell stores logic '1'.
The progressive scaling demands effort from both the circuit and the device level, to cope with circuit variability and reliability issues. Advent of FinFET technology has suppresses the short channel effects and variability, but still suffers with self heating problem consequently increases temporal degradations. In this paper, we investigate severity of Negative Bias Temperature Instability (NBTI) and proposes an adaptable trip point sensing based compensation technique to satisfy performance metrics for NBTI aware Independent Gate (IG) FinFET based SRAM. Simulation results are carried out using HSPICE with PTM 32nm IG-FinFET technology demonstrate that threshold voltage deviates from its nominal value by 17%, causing 6% and 13% degradation in SNM and RNM, respectively under NBTI degradation at 125 • C for 3 years. The proposed technique yields 42% reduced read failures under NBTI. Thus, proposed approach improves the stability of SRAM array during its operational life and hence, reliability of the system.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.