Investigation of PVT-Aware STT-MRAM Sensing Circuits for Low-VDD Scenario - Archive ouverte HAL
Article Dans Une Revue Micromachines Année : 2021

Investigation of PVT-Aware STT-MRAM Sensing Circuits for Low-VDD Scenario

Résumé

Spintronic based embedded magnetic random access memory (eMRAM) is becoming a foundry validated solution for the next-generation nonvolatile memory applications. The hybrid complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS)/magnetic tunnel junction (MTJ) integration has been selected as a proper candidate for energy harvesting, area-constraint and energy-efficiency Internet of Things (IoT) systems-on-chips. Multi-VDD (low supply voltage) techniques were adopted to minimize energy dissipation in MRAM, at the cost of reduced writing/sensing speed and margin. Meanwhile, yield can be severely affected due to variations in process parameters. In this work, we conduct a thorough analysis of MRAM sensing margin and yield. We propose a current-mode sensing amplifier (CSA) named 1D high-sensing 1D margin, high 1D speed and 1D stability (HMSS-SA) with reconfigured reference path and pre-charge transistor. Process-voltage-temperature (PVT) aware analysis is performed based on an MTJ compact model and an industrial 28 nm CMOS technology, explicitly considering low-voltage (0.7 V), low tunneling magnetoresistance (TMR) (50%) and high temperature (85 °C) scenario as the worst sensing case. A case study takes a brief look at sensing circuits, which is applied to in-memory bit-wise computing. Simulation results indicate that the proposed high-sensing margin, high speed and stability sensing-sensing amplifier (HMSS-SA) achieves remarkable performance up to 2.5 GHz sensing frequency. At 0.65 V supply voltage, it can achieve 1 GHz operation frequency with only 0.3% failure rate.

Dates et versions

hal-04420923 , version 1 (27-01-2024)

Identifiants

Citer

Zhongjian Bian, Xiaofeng Hong, Yanan Guo, Lirida Naviner, Wei Ge, et al.. Investigation of PVT-Aware STT-MRAM Sensing Circuits for Low-VDD Scenario. Micromachines, 2021, 12 (5), pp.551. ⟨10.3390/mi12050551⟩. ⟨hal-04420923⟩
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