Comparative BTI impact for SRAM cell and sense amplifier designs

Bias Temperature Instability (BTI) in transistors has become a major reliability challenge with the continuous downscaling of CMOS technologies. This paper presents the impact of BTI on SRAM cells and sense amplifiers (SA) while considering both high performance (HP) and low power (LP) designs in 45nm technology node. The results show that the HP designs degrades more than 2× faster than LP designs. Moreover, in terms of absolute numbers, the HP SA seems to be the design with maximum degradation and LP SRAM cell with marginal degradation.

[1]  Said Hamdioui,et al.  BTI analysis for high performance and low power SRAM sense amplifier designs , 2015 .

[2]  Andrew R. Brown,et al.  Impact of NBTI/PBTI on SRAM Stability Degradation , 2011, IEEE Electron Device Letters.

[3]  Shekhar Y. Borkar,et al.  Microarchitecture and Design Challenges for Gigascale Integration , 2004, MICRO.

[4]  Stefan Cosemans,et al.  Variability-Aware Design of Low Power SRAM Memories (Variabiliteitsbewust ontwerp van SRAM geheugens met een zeer laag energieverbruik) , 2009 .

[5]  Sachin S. Sapatnekar,et al.  Impact of NBTI on SRAM read stability and design for reliability , 2006, 7th International Symposium on Quality Electronic Design (ISQED'06).

[6]  Francky Catthoor,et al.  Comparison of Reaction-Diffusion and Atomistic Trap-Based BTI Models for Logic Gates , 2014, IEEE Transactions on Device and Materials Reliability.

[7]  R. Degraeve,et al.  Origin of NBTI variability in deeply scaled pFETs , 2010, 2010 IEEE International Reliability Physics Symposium.

[8]  Antonio Rubio,et al.  Process variability-aware proactive reconfiguration technique for mitigating aging effects in nano scale SRAM lifetime , 2012, 2012 IEEE 30th VLSI Test Symposium (VTS).

[9]  Said Hamdioui,et al.  BTI impact on SRAM sense amplifier , 2013, 2013 8th IEEE Design and Test Symposium.

[10]  N. Horiguchi,et al.  Response of a single trap to AC negative Bias Temperature stress , 2011, 2011 International Reliability Physics Symposium.

[11]  Muhammad Ashraful Alam,et al.  A comprehensive model of PMOS NBTI degradation , 2005, Microelectron. Reliab..

[12]  Francky Catthoor,et al.  Integral impact of BTI and voltage temperature variation on SRAM sense amplifier , 2015, 2015 IEEE 33rd VLSI Test Symposium (VTS).

[13]  Michael Nicolaidis,et al.  Reliability challenges of real-time systems in forthcoming technology nodes , 2013, 2013 Design, Automation & Test in Europe Conference & Exhibition (DATE).

[14]  T. Grasser,et al.  Defect-based methodology for workload-dependent circuit lifetime projections - Application to SRAM , 2013, 2013 IEEE International Reliability Physics Symposium (IRPS).

[15]  Francky Catthoor,et al.  Impact of partial resistive defects and Bias Temperature Instability on SRAM decoder reliablity , 2013, 2013 8th IEEE Design and Test Symposium.