Design of Power- and Variability-Aware Nonvolatile RRAM Cell Using Memristor as a Memory Element

A 3 CNFETs and 2 memristors-based half-select disturbance free 3T2R resistive RAM (RRAM) cell is proposed in this paper. While the two memristors act as the nonvolatile memory elements, CNFETs are employed as high-performance switches. The proposed cell is capable of implementing bit-interleaving architecture and various error correction coding (ECC) schemes can be applied to mitigate soft-errors. The 3T2R cell has been compared with the standard 6T SRAM (S6T) and 2T2R cells. At a supply voltage of 2 V, the 3T2R cell exhibits <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$7.24\times $ </tex-math></inline-formula> shorter write delay (<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${T} _{\text {WA}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>) and <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$2.89\times $ </tex-math></inline-formula> lower variability in <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${T} _{\text {WA}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> than that of 2T2R. Moreover, it exhibits <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$5.08\times /4.33\times $ </tex-math></inline-formula> lower variability in <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${T} _{\text {RA}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> and <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$1.46\times 10^{7}\times /2.07\times $ </tex-math></inline-formula> lower hold power (<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${H} _{\text {PWR}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>) dissipation than that of S6T/ 2T2R at <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${V} _{\text {DD}} = 2$ </tex-math></inline-formula> V. In addition, it exhibits tolerance to variations in <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${V} _{\text {th}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> of memristor while being immune to resistance-state drift and random telegraph noise (RTN)-induced instabilities during the read operation. The vastly superior characteristics of CNFET devices over MOSFETs, in combination with memristor technology, leads to such appreciable improvement in design metrics of the proposed design.

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