A high-speed sensing scheme for 1T dynamic RAMs utilizing theclamped bit-line sense amplifier

A clamped-bit-line sense amplifier (CBLSA) capable of very high-speed operation in one-transistor (1T) DRAM applications has been developed. Results from an experimental test chip demonstrate that the speed of the new circuit is insensitive to bit-line capacitance. Circuit speed is also found to be insensitive to the initial bit-line difference voltage. The CBLSA maintains a low impedance fixed potential on the bit lines during sensing, virtually eliminating sensitivity to inter-bit-line noise coupling and minimizing power supply bounce during sensing. The new sense amplifier operates at higher speeds than conventional circuits and still dissipates less power     

一种高速只读存储器拓扑结构的设计

随着只读存储器密度越来越大,对读取速度的要求越来越高,位线大电容逐渐成为影响只读存储器读取速度的关键问题.设计了一种存储器拓扑结构,这种结构通过改变存储单元读取点的位置,能有效避免位线大电容充放电对读取速度的不利影响,极大地缩短了读取周期,提高了只读存储器的读取速度.该拓扑结构的优势在TSMC 0.13μm工艺仿真库里得到验证.     

A 0.25-/spl mu/m 3.0-V 1T1C 32-Mb nonvolatile ferroelectric RAM with address transition detector and current forcing latch sense amplifier scheme

Nonvolatile 32-Mb ferroelectric random access memory (FRAM) with-a 0.25-/spl mu/m design rule was developed by using an address transition detector (ATD) control scheme for the application to SRAM and applying a common plate folded bit-line cell scheme with current forcing latch sense amplifier (CFLSA) for increasing sensing margin, and adopting a dual bit-line reference voltage generator (DBRVG) for high noise immunity. Compared to a conventional FRAM device, the total chip size is reduced by 10.87%, which was achieved by using a single section data line (SSDL) and removing large gate-oxide capacitors, which is typically used for reference voltage generator for 1T1C FRAM. Furthermore, the imbalance of reference bit-line capacitance and main bit-line capacitance was resolved by using the CFLSA technique.     

高速低功耗电流型灵敏放大器的设计

提出了一款适合在低电压、大容量SRAM中应用的高速低功耗电流型灵敏放大器。该电路在交叉耦合反相器之间添加了一对隔离管,有效消除了大量位线寄生电容所带来的负面影响,从而极大提高了灵敏放大器的速度。同时,通过对时序控制电路的优化,有效降低了放大器的功耗。采用SMIC0．13μm数字工艺在HSpice下进行仿真,结果表明：在室温,1．2V工作电压下,灵敏放大器的放大延迟仅为0．344ns,功耗为102μw。相比文献中提出的电流型灵敏放大器,速度分别提高了9．47％和31．2％,功耗则降低了64．8％与63％。     

High-speed sensing scheme for CMOS DRAMs

A significant improvement in sensing speed over the half-V_DD bit-line precharge sensing scheme is obtained by precharging the bit line to approximately 2/3 V_DD. The 2/3-V_DD sensing scheme also results in higher-bit-line capacitance, asymmetrical bit-line swing, and higher power consumption. However, the speed advantage of 2/3-V_DD sensing may outweigh the disadvantages and can significantly improve DRAM performance. For the unboosted word-line case, symmetrical bit-line swing can be retained by limiting the bit-line downward voltage swing through a clamping circuit added to the sense amplifier, resulting in almost no loss of stored charge in a cell. The authors show that the 2/3-V_DD sensing with a limited bit-line swing has several distinct advantages over the half-V_DD sensing scheme and is particularly suitable for high-performance high density CMOS DRAMs     

A four-level storage 4-Gb DRAM

A 4-Gb DRAM with multilevel-storage memory cells has been developed. This large memory capacity is achieved by storing data at four levels, each corresponding to two-bit-data storage in a single memory cell. The four-level storage reduces the effective cell size by 50%. A sense amplifier using charge coupling and charge sharing was developed for the four-level sensing and restoring. The sense amplifier uses a hierarchical bit-line scheme and operates in a time-sharing mode, thus reducing the sense amplifier area. A 4-Gb DRAM fabricated using 0.15-μm CMOS technology measures 986 mm². The memory cell is 0.23 μm². Its capacitance of 60 fF is achieved by using a high-dielectric-constant material BST     

A 150 ns 16-Mb CMOS SRAM with interdigitated bit-line architecture

Circuit techniques for a reduced-voltage-amplitude data bus, fast access 16-Mb CMOS SRAM are described. An interdigitated bit-line architecture reduces data bus line length, thus minimizing bus capacitance. A hierarchical sense amplifier consists of 32 local sense amplifiers and a current sense amplifier. The current sense amplifier is used to reduce the data bus voltage amplitude and the sensing of the 16-b data bus signals in parallel. Access time of 15 ns and an active power of 165 mW were achieved in a 16-Mb CMOS SRAM. A split-word-line layout memory cell with double-gate pMOS thin-film transistors (TFTs) keeps the transistor width stable while providing high-stability memory cell characteristics. The double-gate pMOS TFT also increases cell-storage node capacitance and soft-error immunity     

Experimental investigation of the minimum signal for reliable operation of DRAM sense amplifiers

Discusses the measurement of the minimum sense signal necessary for proper operation of the dynamic RAM (DRAM) sense amplifier. The minimum sense signal has been investigated experimentally by using a test structure that is basically a modified cross-coupled sense amplifier with 16-Mb DRAM feature sizes. Measured 5 sigma values of 27 mV correspond to variation in gate length, whereas 10 mV is found for bit-line capacitance asymmetries. The way that the minimum sense signal is affected by the different trigger-pulse slopes was investigated. A simple but illustrative analysis of the effect of device mismatches is developed and the measured values are compared with theoretical limits.<>     

Current-mode techniques for high-speed VLSI circuits withapplication to current sense amplifier for CMOS SRAM's

The speed of VLSI chips is increasingly limited by signal delay in long interconnect lines. A simple analysis shows that major speed improvements are possible when using current-mode rather than conventional voltage-mode signal transporting techniques. The key to this approach is the use of low-resistance current-signal circuits to drastically reduce the impedance level and the voltage swings on long interconnect lines. As an example, a simple four-transistor current-sense amplifier for fast CMOS SRAMs is proposed. The circuit presents a virtual short circuit to the bit lines, thus reducing the sensing delay, which is rendered practically insensitive to the bit-line capacitance. In addition, the virtual short circuit ensures equal bit-line voltages, thus eliminating the need for bit-line equalization during a read access     

基于电阻电流镜的低压灵敏放大器设计

提出一种适用于低压快闪存储器的电流模式的低压灵敏放大器.该灵敏放大器在基准电流产生电路中使用电阻电流镜代替传统的晶体管电流镜,使得基准电流产生电路的工作电压减少了一个阈值电压,从而降低灵敏放大器的工作电压.位线电压控制电路中运算放大器的使用减少了由于温度和工艺变化所引起的位线电压变化,进而提高读取操作的精度.采用中芯国际90nm工艺设计,提出的灵敏放大器在1.2V电源电压时的读取时间是14.7ns,相对于传统的结构,单个灵敏放大器的功耗被优化了13%.     

BiCMOS circuit technology for high-speed DRAMs

A BiCMOS circuit technology featured by a novel bit-line sense amplifier has been developed. The bit-line sense amplifier is composed of a BiCMOS differential amplifier, the impedance-converting means featured by the CMOS current mirror circuit or the clocked CMOS inverter between the bit line and the base node of the BiCMOS differential amplifier, and a conventional CMOS flip-flop. This technology can reduce the access time to half that of a conventional CMOS DRAM access time. Applied to a 1-kb DRAM test chip, a new BiCMOS circuit technology was successfully verified. Furthermore, the sensitivity and area penalty of the new BiCMOS bit-line sense amplifier and future applications to megabit DRAMs are discussed     

A 17-ns 4-Mb CMOS DRAM

A 17-ns nonaddress-multiplexed 4-Mb dynamic RAM (DRAM) fabricated with a pure CMOS process is described. The speed limitations of the conventional DRAM sensing technique are discussed, and the advantages of using the direct bit-line sensing technique are explained. A direct bit-line sensing technique with a two-stage amplifier is described. One readout amplifier is composed of a two-stage current-mirror amplifier and a selected readout amplifier is activated by a column decoder output before the selected word line rises. The amplifier then detects a small bit-line signal appearing on a bit-line pair immediately after the word-line rise. This two-stage amplification scheme is essential to improving access time, especially in the case of a CMOS process. The high sensitivity of the readout amplifier is discussed, and the electrical features and characteristics of the fabricated DRAM are reported     

A 40-ns 64-Mb DRAM with 64-b parallel data bus architecture

The authors describe circuit techniques for wide input/output (I/O) data path and high-speed 64-Mb dynamic RAMs (DRAMs). A hierarchical data bus structure using double-level metallization has been developed to form 64-b parallel data bus lines without increasing the chip size. A current-sensing data bus amplifier, developed to sense the 64-b data bus signal in parallel, has made the wide I/O data path structure possible. A direct-sensing type column gate circuit with the READ/WRITE separated select line scheme achieves 40-ns RAS access. A shielded bit-line three-dimensional stacked-capacitor cell with a double-fin storage capacitor stores sufficient charge while the bit-line capacitance shows a reasonable value for sensing the data     

High cell-efficiency synchronous MRAM adopting unified bit-line cache

Unlike the 1T1C cell of the DRAM that suffers the crucial limitation on the bit-line capacitance, the stored information in the couple of the magnetic-tunnel-junction (MTJ) cell is not related to the bit-line capacitance. To achieve the high cell efficiency for the synchronous magneto-resistive random access memory (MRAM), the unified bit-line cache scheme is proposed. It simplifies the column path and provides the low-latency column operations.     

Offset compensating bit-line sensing scheme for high density DRAM's

This paper describes a new bit-line sensing scheme that minimizes the sensitivity degradation caused by the electrical imbalance in a sense amplifier composed of scaled-down transistors. The new sensing scheme incorporates an offset compensating technique in a direct bit-line sensing scheme using a current-mirror differential amplifier. The compensation is performed by means of a simple negative feedback method that accomplishes cancellation of the total electrical imbalance in the sense amplifier with a short presetting time. The features of the circuit have been examined using simple DRAM test chips fabricated with a 0.5 μm CMOS process. Experimental results indicate that the magnitude of the imbalance of the sense amplifier is reduced to one-sixth by introducing the offset compensating scheme as compared to the conventional sensing scheme     

Mismatch sensitivity of a simultaneously latched CMOS senseamplifier

Derives a new formula for the sensitivity of a vertically matched CMOS sense amplifier, of the type used in dynamic-RAMs (DRAMs), to threshold voltage mismatch, parasitic capacitance mismatch, transconductance mismatch, and bit-line load capacitance mismatch. The formula yields insight into the DRAM sensing operation. The authors derive a sensitivity formula for this sensing scheme, using perturbation theory. The perturbation approach is rigorous: it avoids most approximations and ad-hoc assumptions, it introduces no free constants to be determined from simulations, and it yields an explicit closed-form solution. The formula agrees well with simulations. It is inherently slightly conservative and thus appropriate for use in design     

A 0.5-μm, 3-V 1T1C, 1-Mbit FRAM with a variable referencebit-line voltage scheme using a fatigue-free reference capacitor

A 0.5-μm, 3-V operated, 1TIC, 1-Mbit FRAM with 160-ns access time has been developed. In FRAM, a reference voltage design using a ferroelectric capacitor is difficult because of the degradation due to fatigue, a chip-to-chip variation, and a temperature dependence. A variable reference voltage scheme is generated to solve this problem, boosting a fatigue-free and temperature-independent MOS reference capacitance by a driver. The driver is operated from a compact reference voltage generator that provides 32 equally divided voltages and occupies only half the layout area of a conventional one. During sense operation, memory-cell capacitance C_ferr is larger than reference-cell capacitance C_MOS. A double word-line pulse scheme has also been developed to eliminate a bit-line capacitance imbalance in the bit-line pairs, where a memory cell and a reference cell are separated from the bit-line pairs during sense operation. A six-order improvement in imprint lifetime has been achieved by the new scheme     

Half-V/SUB DD/ bit-line sensing scheme in CMOS DRAMs

A sensing scheme in which the bit line is precharged to half V/SUB DD/ is introduced for CMOS DRAMs. The proposed circuitry uses a PMOS memory array and incorporates the following features: (1) a complementary sense amplifier consisting of NMOS and PMOS cross-coupled pairs; (2) clocked pulldown of the latching node; (3) complementary clocking of the PMOS pullup; (4) full-sized dummy cell generation of reference potential for sensing; (5) shorting transistor to equalize precharge potential of bit lines; and (6) depletion NMOS decoupling transistors for multiplexing bit lines. The study shows that the half-V/SUB DD/ bit-line sensing scheme has several unique advantages, especially for high-performance high-density CMOS DRAMs, which compared to the full-V/SUB DD/ bit-line sensing scheme used for NMOS memory arrays or the grounded bit-line sensing scheme for PMOS arrays in CMOS DRAMs.     

Impact and mitigation of SRAM read path aging

This paper proposes an appropriate method to estimate and mitigate the impact of aging on the read path of a high performance SRAM design; it analyzes the impact of the memory cell, and sense amplifier (SA), and their interaction. The method considers different workloads, technology nodes, and inspects both the bit-line swing (BLS) (which reflect the degradation of the cell) and the sensing delay (SD) (which reflects the degradation of the sense amplifier); the voltage swing on the bit lines has a direct impact on the proper functionality of the sense amplifier. The results with respect to the quantification of the aging, show for the considered SRAM read-path design that the cell degradation is marginal as compared to the sense amplifier, while the SD degradation strongly depends on the workload, supply voltage, temperature, and technology nodes (up to 41% degradation). The mitigation schemes, one targeting the cell and one the sense amplifier, confirm the same and show that sense amplifier mitigation (up to 15.2% improvement) is more effective for the SRAM read path than cell mitigation (up to 11.4% improvement).     

一种高速自控预充电灵敏放大器的设计

提出了一种用于非挥发性存储器的新型电压灵敏放大器.该电路采用一种可以自动关断、电流可控的预充电路,可以有效消除由于存储容量变大带来的巨大位线寄生电容的影响,有效提高了灵敏放大器的读取速度.经验证,该结构具有较快的读取速度,在3.3 V工作电压下,电路读取时间为11 ns.