Self-calibration technique for reduction of hold failures in low-power nano-scaled SRAM

Swaroop Ghosh, Saibal Mukhopadhyay, Keejong Kim, Kaushik Roy

Abstract: Increasing source voltage (Source-Biasing) is an efficient technique for reducing gate and sub-threshold leakage of SRAM arrays. However, due to process variation, a higher source voltage can significantly increase data flipping in standby mode (Hold Failures) resulting in faulty memories. This imposes serious concerns in reducing standby power with source-bias. In this paper, we analyze the effect of source bias on hold failures under both inter-die and intra-die variations. We propose a self-calibrating SRAM for aggressively reducing leakage while maintaining the hold failures under control.