Partial support from the National Science Foundation
Project Summary: In many modern microprocessors, caches occupy a large portion of the die. For example, in Intel’s Itanium 2 Montecito processor, more than 80% of the die is dedicated to caches. Since the leakage power dissipation is roughly proportional to the area of a circuit, the leakage power of caches is one of the major sources of power consumption in high performance microprocessors. Our research on SRAM design focuses on leakage reduction in such memory structures and on judicious use of multiple Vth and multiple tox transistors in a large SRAM array and power-ground-gated, data-retentive SRAM cells.
Low-Leakage SRAM Design in Deep Submicron Technologies — This January-2008 presentation has two parts. In the first part, a method based on dual-Vt and dual-Tox assignment is presented to reduce the total leakage power dissipation of SRAMs while maintaining their performance. The proposed method is based on the observation that read and write delays of a memory cell in an SRAM block depend on the physical distance of the cell from the sense amplifier and the decoder. Thus, the idea is to deploy different configurations of six-transistor SRAM cells corresponding to different threshold voltage and oxide thickness assignments for the transistors. Unlike other techniques for low-leakage SRAM design, the proposed technique incurs neither area nor delay overhead. In addition, it results in a minor change in the SRAM design flow. The leakage saving achieved by using this technique is a function of the values of the high threshold voltage and the oxide thickness, as well as the number of rows and columns in the cell array. Simulation results with a 65nm process demonstrate that this technique can reduce the total leakage power dissipation of a 64 512 SRAM array by 33% and that of a 32 512 SRAM array by 40%. In the second part, a gated-supply, gated-ground data retention technique for CMOS SRAM cells to enable design of robust and ultra low-power caches in very deep submicron CMOS technologies is presented. We show that, given a fixed value of the voltage difference on the power rails of the SRAM cell during the standby mode, the proposed power-ground-gating (PG-gating) solution achieves significantly higher leakage power savings compared to either power supply (P) gating or ground (G) gating techniques while improving the static noise margin and soft error rate. In particular, it is shown that optimum ground and supply voltage levels exist for which the SRAM cell leakage is minimized subject to a hold static noise margin constraint. When the PG-gated cell is not accessed for read/write operations, it is biased to the optimum values of ground and supply voltages, resulting in minimum leakage power consumption. Simulation results demonstrate that the PG-gating technique has a higher hold and read static noise margin, lower soft error rate, and also higher leakage saving compared to single P or G gating techniques at the expense of an increase in the area overhead. Moreover, the PG-gated cell exhibits less leakage variability under process and temperature variations compared to single P or G gating techniques. Moreover, its hold static noise margin is more robust to process variations. For a 64Kb SRAM array designed in 130nm CMOS technology with Vdd=1.3V and a 180mV hold static noise margin, the leakage power of PG-gated design is 60% lower than that of a low power G-gated design.