B.3.0 General
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- Data retention voltage (DRV) (1)
- Emerging Memories (1)
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This study presents an energy-efficient ultra-low voltage standard-cell based memory in 28nm FD-SOI. The storage element (standard-cell latch) is replaced with a full- custom designed latch with 50 % less area. Error-free operation is demonstrated down to 450mV @ 9MHz. By utilizing body bias (BB) @ VDD = 0.5 V performance spans from 20 MHz @ BB=0V to 110MHz @ BB=1V.
Emerging Memories (EMs) could benefit from Error Correcting Codes (ECCs) able to correct few errors in a few nanoseconds. The low latency is necessary to meet the DRAM- like and/or eXecuted-in-Place requirements of Storage Class Memory devices. The error correction capability would help manufacturers to cope with unknown failure mechanisms and to fulfill the market demand for a rapid increase in density. This paper shows the design of an ECC decoder for a shortened BCH code with 256-data-bit page able to correct three errors in less than 3 ns. The tight latency constraint is met by pre-computing the coefficients of carefully chosen Error Locator Polynomials, by optimizing the operations in the Galois Fields and by resorting to a fully parallel combinatorial implementation of the decoder. The latency and the area occupancy are first estimated by the number of elementary gates to traverse, and by the total number of elementary gates of the decoder. Eventually, the implementation of the solution by Synopsys topographical synthesis methodology in 54nm logic gate length CMOS technology gives a latency lower than 3 ns and a total area less than \(250 \cdot 10^3 \mu m^2\).
To continue reducing voltage in scaled technologies, both circuit and architecture-level resiliency techniques are needed to tolerate process-induced defects, variation, and aging in SRAM cells. Many different resiliency schemes have been proposed and evaluated, but most prior results focus on voltage reduction instead of energy reduction. At the circuit level, device cell architectures and assist techniques have been shown to lower Vmin for SRAM, while at the architecture level, redundancy and cache disable techniques have been used to improve resiliency at low voltages. This paper presents a unified study of error tolerance for both circuit and architecture techniques and estimates their area and energy overheads. Optimal techniques are selected by evaluating both the error-correcting abilities at low supplies and the overheads of each technique in a 28nm. The results can be applied to many of the emerging memory technologies.
In this paper, we show the feasibility of low supply voltage for SRAM (Static Random Access Memory) by adding error correction coding (ECC). In SRAM, the memory matrix needs to be powered for data retentive standby operation, resulting in standby leakage current. Particularly for low duty- cycle systems, the energy consumed due to standby leakage current can become significant. Lowering the supply voltage (VDD) during standby mode to below the specified data retention voltage (DRV) helps decrease the leakage current. At these VDD levels errors start to appear, which we can remedy by adding ECC. We show in this paper that addition of a simple single error correcting (SEC) ECC enables us to decrease the leakage current by 45% and leakage power by 72%. We verify this on a large set of commercially available standard 40nm SRAMs.