High-Stability and High-Speed 11T CNTFET SRAM Cell for MIMO Applications

Abstract

Many researchers are actively working on developing a fast-performing static random-access memory (SRAM) cell with low-power consumption and high stability. This study also introduces one such new and all-round excellent SRAM cell. In this paper, an SRAM cell with eleven transistors (11T) developed using carbon nanotube field effect transistor (CNTFET) is introduced. This new 11T CNTFET SRAM cell is another variant of the Schmitt-trigger (ST)-based SRAM cell. This new SRAM cell structure is achieved by incorporating a single-ended write mode, a feed-back cutting technique and a single-ended read approach into a Schmitt-trigger (ST)-based SRAM cell. The WSNM of the proposed 11T CNTFET SRAM cell is increased by using single-ended writing scheme and feed-back cutting method in the cell. The single ended read approach of 11T CNTFET SRAM cell increases the RSNM as the storage nodes are not disturbed. The write power, hold power, read power, WSNM, HSNM, RSNM, write delay and read delay of this 11T CNTFET SRAM cell are 2.1538e-10 W, 1.7077e-09 W, 1.4524e-08 W, 423.61 mV, 402.20 mV, 425.56 mV, 1.2932e-10s and 5.5225e-12s, respectively. The parameters of the proposed cell are compared with 6T SRAM [M. Elangovan and K. Gunavathi, Stability analysis of 6T CNTFET SRAM cell for single and multiple CNTs, 2018 4th Int. Conf. Devices, Circuits Syst., Coimbatore, India, 16–17 March 2018, vol. 2, pp. 63–67], 8T SRAM [M. Elangovan, A novel Darlington based 8T CNTFET SRAM cell for low, J. Circuits Syst. Comput. 30 (2021) 2150213], 12T SRAM [S. Pal, S. Bose, W. H. Ki and A. Islam, Half-select-free low-power dynamic loop-cutting write assist SRAM cell for space applications, IEEE Trans. Electron Dev. 67 (2020) 80–89, doi:10.1109/TED.2019.2952397], 12T SRAM [N. Yadav, A. P. Shah and S. K. Vishvakarma, Stable, reliable, and bit-interleaving 12T SRAM for space applications: A device circuit co-design, IEEE Trans. Semicond. Manuf. 30 (2017) 276–284, doi:10.1109/TSM.2017.2718029], 12T SRA-M [P. Sharma, S. Gupta, K. Gupta and N. Pandey, A low power subthreshold Schmitt Trigger-based 12T SRAM bit cell with process-variation-tolerant write-ability, Microelectron. J. 97 (2020) 104703, doi:10.1016/j.mejo.2020.104703] and 12T SRAM [P. Sharma, S. Gupta, K. Gupta and N. Pandey, A low power subthreshold Schmitt Trigger based 12T SRAM bit cell with process-variation-tolerant write-ability, Microelectron. J. 97 (2020) 104703, doi:10.1016/j.mejo.2020.104703] cells to understand the performance of the proposed SRAM cell. From the comparative study, it is observed that the proposed cell is more stable than the other cells considered for the comparison and consumes less power in all write, read and hold modes. Also, the read time of the introduced cell is much less than the others. This study also recorded the information on how the performance of an SRAM cell varies as the CNTFET parameters change. The simulation is done with the HSPICE simulation tool using the Stanford University 32[Formula: see text]nm CNTFET model.