Thermal Stability Analysis of Single-Ended 9T-ST Robust SRAM Cell for Near-Threshold Operation

Abstract

This paper presents a single-ended Schmitt Trigger-based 9T SRAM cell, significantly improving thermal stability for real-time memory applications on a chip operated in a high radiation environment. The proposed single-ended 9T-ST SRAM cell has 73% and 13% improvement in read stability, 42% and 13% improvement in hold stability from 6T and 10T SRAM cells, respectively. The read stability of the proposed SRAM cell is compared with the conventional 6T SRAM cell, which is designed and tested for 23000 MC simulation samples to protect it from read failure. During read operation, the impact of temperature variation on the performance of memory cells is observed using Monte Carlo simulation for a temperature change from 20∘C to 60∘C, as 5%, 32%, and 48% variation in RSNM for 9T-ST, 10T-ST, and 6T SRAM cells, respectively. The proposed SRAM cell is designed and verified in the Synopsys Custom compiler.