Programmable cell array using rewritable solid-electrolyte switch integrated in 90nm CMOS

Programmable devices such as SRAM-based FPGAs have the major challenges of power consumption and circuit area due to the excessive standby leakage current and the threshold voltage variation in highly scaled SRAM. Back-end-of-line (BEOL) device, which is integrated in the interconnect layers, is attractive for reducing the performance gap between FPGA and cell-based ASIC [1–4]. In this paper, we demonstrate the fundamental operations of a programmable cell array and a 32×32 crossbar switch using a nonvolatile and rewritable solid-electrolyte switch (nanobridge or NB). A 72% reduction in chip-area compared with that of a standard-cell-based design is achieved on a 90nm CMOS platform.

[1]  S. Chiang,et al.  Antifuse structure comparison for field programmable gate arrays , 1992, 1992 International Technical Digest on Electron Devices Meeting.

[2]  K. Terabe,et al.  Quantized conductance atomic switch , 2005, Nature.

[3]  T. Sakamoto,et al.  A nonvolatile programmable solid-electrolyte nanometer switch , 2004, IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits.

[4]  N. Sakimura,et al.  Polymer solid-electrolyte (PSE) switch embedded in 90nm CMOS with forming-free and 10nsec programming for low power, nonvolatile programmable logic (NPL) , 2010, 2010 International Electron Devices Meeting.

[5]  Mingjie Lin,et al.  Performance Benefits of Monolithically Stacked 3-D FPGA , 2006, IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems.