Novel Approaches Toward Area- and Energy-Efficient Embedded Memories

Pascal Andreas Meinerzhagen
2014
directeurs de thèse Prof. C. Enz, rapporteur Prof. A. Fish, rapporteur Prof. J. Rodrigues, rapporteur V T standard-cell based memories, and for teaching me their sub-V T characterization flow. iv Acknowledgments Moreover, I am addressing many thanks to Oskar Andersson and Babak Mohammadi for various great collaborations on the design, manufacturing, and measurement of many sub-V T memories based on custom-designed standard-cells. Many thanks to all of them. I am also deeply grateful to several
more » ... eople from Ben-Gurion University and Bar-Ilan University, Israel, which I could both visit several times during the completion of my PhD studies. I am truly and deeply grateful to Adam (Adi) Teman, who I extensively collaborated with in the field of gain-cell memories during the last years of my PhD curriculum, which resulted in many great contributions to this thesis; Adi taught me many circuit techniques for use in CMOS memory arrays, how to prioritize tasks and get work done efficiently, as well as a positive and healthy attitude toward research, teaching, networking, and life. I am also grateful to Anatoli Mordakhay who devised and measured several gain-cell test circuits. I would also like to thank Robert Giterman who helped us tremendously with the measurement of various gain-cell eDRAM test chips and who continued research into low-power gain-cell memories. Many thanks to all of them. In addition, I would like to truly thank a number of individuals from Intel Labs, Intel Corporation who, in numerous truly enriching discussions provided me with a fresh view on my PhD work from and industry perspective, and helped me to identify future industry-relevant research directions. First of all, I would like to thank my direct advisor Dr. Jaydeep Kulkarni, who dedicated an amazing amount of his time to me (up to three 1:1 meetings per week), and from whom I learned tons in the field of analog and digital IC design, particularly in the field of power management and SRAM. Second, I would like to thank my manager James (Jim) Tschanz, who, in many personal meetings, helped me understand the relevance of my research in a larger context and taught me tons on the activities and the structure of Intel.
doi:10.5075/epfl-thesis-6074 fatcat:4q3q7qy6p5f7nakakhkwyqmi2y