Noise margin, critical charge and power-delay tradeoffs for SRAM design

Abstract

Aggressive technology scaling has resulted in stability reduction for classic SRAM designs. This is especially problematic for large integrated circuits. The stability of SRAM cells can be affected by noise during a read operation and by radiation during the standby mode. In this paper, we present an approach to address the gradual stability reduction in SRAM designs. We present an SRAM design tradeoffs approach to improve the characteristics of SRAM by modulating the transistor sizing ratio, β. We test our approach on various SRAM designs in 32nm technology. We optimize the SRAM designs with β for various constraints in power consumption, performance, radiation tolerance and data stability. We discuss different design trends produced by the extensive approach analysis.