Two-port low-power gain-cell storage array: Voltage scaling and retention time

Rashid Iqbal, Pascal Meinerzhagen, Andreas Burg
2012 2012 IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems  
The impact of supply voltage scaling on the retention time of a 2-transistor (2T) gain-cell (GC) storage array is investigated, in order to enable low-power/low-voltage data storage. The retention time can be increased when scaling down the supply voltage for a given access statistics and a given write bit-line (WBL) control scheme. Moreover, for a given supply voltage, the retention time can be further increased by controlling the WBL to a voltage level between the supply rails during idle and
more » ... read states. These two concepts are proved by means of Spectre simulation of a GC-storage array implemented in 180-nm CMOS technology. The proposed 2-kb storage macro is operated at only 40 % of the nominal supply voltage and leverages the GCs to enable two-port operation with a negligible area-increase compared to a single-port implementation.
doi:10.1109/iscas.2012.6271800 dblp:conf/iscas/IqbalMB12 fatcat:j5rx36i7uner3ctyezzpuced4q