Comparative study of CMOS- and FinFET-based 10T SRAM cell in subthreshold regime

This article presents a variability resilient FinFET based 10T SRAM cell. Critical design metrics of SRAM cells are estimated at subthreshold region and compared with that of conventional MOSFET based 10T SRAM cell. The FinFET based SRAM cell offers 2.33× and 1.29× improvements in Read Access Time (T<sub>RA</sub>) and Write Access Time (T<sub>WA</sub>) respectively. The proposed bitcell also offers 7.06× and 1.54× improvements in T<sub>RA</sub> and T<sub>WA</sub> variability respectively compared to its MOSFET counterpart. Moreover, our bitcell exhibits 20% higher read static noise margin (RSNM) at a cost of 5% reduction in write static noise margin @ 400 mV.

[1]  Mathias Beike,et al.  Digital Integrated Circuits A Design Perspective , 2016 .

[2]  K. Roy,et al.  A 160 mV Robust Schmitt Trigger Based Subthreshold SRAM , 2007, IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits.

[3]  A.P. Chandrakasan,et al.  Nanometer MOSFET Variation in Minimum Energy Subthreshold Circuits , 2008, IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices.

[4]  J. Fellrath,et al.  CMOS analog integrated circuits based on weak inversion operations , 1977 .

[5]  Yu (Kevin) Cao,et al.  What is Predictive Technology Model (PTM)? , 2009, SIGD.

[6]  M. Hasan,et al.  Leakage Characterization of 10T SRAM Cell , 2012, IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices.

[7]  S. Dasgupta,et al.  Device and Circuit Co-Design Robustness Studies in the Subthreshold Logic for Ultralow-Power Applications for 32 nm CMOS , 2010, IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices.

[8]  A. Chandrakasan,et al.  A 180-mV subthreshold FFT processor using a minimum energy design methodology , 2005, IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits.

[9]  Andrew Evert Carlson Device and circuit techniques for reducing variation in nanoscale SRAM , 2008 .

[10]  Bo Zhai,et al.  A 2.60pJ/Inst Subthreshold Sensor Processor for Optimal Energy Efficiency , 2006, 2006 Symposium on VLSI Circuits, 2006. Digest of Technical Papers..

[11]  Jason Liu,et al.  A High-Density Subthreshold SRAM with Data-Independent Bitline Leakage and Virtual Ground Replica Scheme , 2007, 2007 IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference. Digest of Technical Papers.

[12]  C. Radens,et al.  A Sub-600-mV, Fluctuation Tolerant 65-nm CMOS SRAM Array With Dynamic Cell Biasing , 2008, IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits.

[13]  Naveen Verma,et al.  A 65nm 8T Sub-Vt SRAM Employing Sense-Amplifier Redundancy , 2007, 2007 IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference. Digest of Technical Papers.

[14]  Kaushik Roy,et al.  A 32 kb 10T Sub-Threshold SRAM Array With Bit-Interleaving and Differential Read Scheme in 90 nm CMOS , 2009, IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits.

[15]  Anantha P. Chandrakasan,et al.  Low-power CMOS digital design , 1992 .

[16]  H. Fujiwara,et al.  Which is the best dual-port SRAM in 45-nm process technology? — 8T, 10T single end, and 10T differential — , 2008, 2008 IEEE International Conference on Integrated Circuit Design and Technology and Tutorial.

[17]  Mohd. Hasan,et al.  A technique to mitigate impact of process, voltage and temperature variations on design metrics of SRAM Cell , 2012, Microelectron. Reliab..

[18]  Kaushik Roy,et al.  Digital CMOS logic operation in the sub-threshold region , 2000, ACM Great Lakes Symposium on VLSI.