Toward Designing Thermally-Aware Memristance Decoder

Abstract

Memristors are intensively proposed in many applications, such as biosensors and machine learning. Regarding their analog characteristics, memristance decoder is, therefore, an essential part for every memristor-based system. As memristor is a temperature sensitive device, this work proposes a memristance decoder circuit with self-temperature calibration. Its main building block is a comparator which is based on current mode circuit to achieve high performance at low power. The design provides configurable precision based on the available energy and supports both synchronous and asynchronous schemes. Moreover, the VTEAM model is modified to include the temperature effect on the memristance in the analysis. The simulation results, based on UMC 65nm low-leakage CMOS technology, show the following comparator's characteristics: 1.70% maximum offset, 2.91ns worst case latency, 343MHz maximum frequency and 48.79fJ maximum energy per comparison. Monte Carlo simulation shows the metastable state in determining the memristor value. This can be solved by extending the clock period or applying a metastability resolver. The proposed memristor model reveals that memristance at high resistive state degrades quadratically with the rise of the temperature and at 85C nearly reaches the memristance of low resistive state.