Abstract
A feasibility study on Ferroelectric Shadow SRAMs (FE-SRAMs) was performed using circuit simulations. To take into account design constraints set by the cell transistor variability, a simple operation margin search algorithm was proposed and used, which requires only pass/fail information from multiple transient simulations. It was found that stable dynamic recall operations can be achieved by using small enough ferroelectric capacitors, and that non-volatile write energy of well below 10 fJ/bit can be expected, adding minimal area penalty and performance degradation to the base SRAM cell. Scalability to advanced technology nodes is also anticipated. The results show that the FE-SRAM would be an ideal non-volatile memory solution for ultra-low power applications, such as sensor networks powered by energy harvesting.
Highlights
It has long been discussed that wirelessly connected sensor networks powered by energy harvesting (EH) would be a possible enabler of new smart applications [1]
Only the pullup (p1, p2) and pull-down (d1, d2) transistor variability was considered (i.e., n = 4; the Most Probable Failure Point (MPFP) search was done in the four-dimensional space)
It was found that stable FE-SRAM operation is possible by using sufficiently small FE capacitors
Summary
It has long been discussed that wirelessly connected sensor networks powered by energy harvesting (EH) would be a possible enabler of new smart applications [1]. Availability of EH powered sensor devices, which do not need battery replacement, will greatly facilitate realization of large scale wireless sensor networks, since battery replacement will be a major obstacle for such applications. There is a drawback of EH that the power supply is unstable It may be occasionally lost, or even only available for a limited range of time. MRAM is gaining the lead for the generation low power embedded NV memory [8]–[10]. It is still not clear if these alternatives are ideal for EH applications. It is considered that, to realize EH sensor networks, an even lower power NV memory solution should be explored
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