Low-leakage asymmetric-cell SRAM

N. Azizi, A. Moshovos, F.N. Najm
Proceedings of the International Symposium on Low Power Electronics and Design  
We introduce a novel family of asymmetric dualstatic random access memory cell designs that reduce leakage power in caches while maintaining low access latency. Our designs exploit the strong bias toward zero at the bit level exhibited by the memory value stream of ordinary programs. Compared to conventional symmetric high-performance cells, our cells offer significant leakage reduction in the zero state and, in some cases, also in the one state, albeit to a lesser extent. A novel sense
more » ... r, in combination with dummy bitlines, allows for read times to be on par with conventional symmetric cells. With one cell design, leakage is reduced by 7 (in the zero state) with no performance degradation, but with a stability degradation of 6%. Another cell design reduces leakage by 2 (in the zero state) with no performance or stability loss. An alternative cell design reduces leakage by 58 (in the zero state) with a performance degradation of 1% and an area increase of 2.4% and no stability degradation. Index Terms-Asymmetric static random access memory (SRAM) cell, dual-threshold voltage, leakage current, static memory.
doi:10.1109/lpe.2002.1029518 fatcat:oantraiarfaofapoqeray6sohm