TY - GEN
T1 - Mitigation of Sense Amplifier Degradation Using Skewed Design
AU - Kraak, Daniel
AU - Taouil, Mottaqiallah
AU - Hamdioui, Said
AU - Weckx, Pieter
AU - Cosemans, Stefan
AU - Catthoor, Francky
N1 - Because of the COVID-19 outbreak, the conference took place in a virtual environment, in April and May 2020.
PY - 2020/3
Y1 - 2020/3
N2 - Designers typically add design margins to semiconductor memories to compensate for aging. However, the aging impact increases with technology downscaling, leading to the need for higher margins. This results into a negative impact on area, yield, performance, and power consumption. As an alternative, mitigation schemes can be developed to reduce such impact. This paper proposes a mitigation scheme for the memory's sense amplifier (SA); the scheme is based on creating a skew in the relative strengths of the SA's cross-coupled inverters during design. The skew is compensated by aging due to unbalanced workloads. As a result, the impact of aging on the SA is reduced. To validate the mitigation scheme, the degradation of the sense amplifier is analyzed for several workloads. The experimental results show that the proposed mitigation scheme reduces the degradation of the sense amplifier's critical figure-of-merit, the offset voltage, with up to 26%.
AB - Designers typically add design margins to semiconductor memories to compensate for aging. However, the aging impact increases with technology downscaling, leading to the need for higher margins. This results into a negative impact on area, yield, performance, and power consumption. As an alternative, mitigation schemes can be developed to reduce such impact. This paper proposes a mitigation scheme for the memory's sense amplifier (SA); the scheme is based on creating a skew in the relative strengths of the SA's cross-coupled inverters during design. The skew is compensated by aging due to unbalanced workloads. As a result, the impact of aging on the SA is reduced. To validate the mitigation scheme, the degradation of the sense amplifier is analyzed for several workloads. The experimental results show that the proposed mitigation scheme reduces the degradation of the sense amplifier's critical figure-of-merit, the offset voltage, with up to 26%.
KW - aging
KW - memory
KW - mitigation
KW - sense amplifier
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85087411085&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.23919/DATE48585.2020.9116532
DO - 10.23919/DATE48585.2020.9116532
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85087411085
T3 - Proceedings of the 2020 Design, Automation and Test in Europe Conference and Exhibition, DATE 2020
SP - 1614
EP - 1617
BT - Proceedings of the 2020 Design, Automation and Test in Europe Conference and Exhibition, DATE 2020
A2 - Di Natale, Giorgio
A2 - Bolchini, Cristiana
A2 - Vatajelu, Elena-Ioana
PB - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
T2 - 2020 Design, Automation and Test in Europe Conference and Exhibition, DATE 2020
Y2 - 9 March 2020 through 13 March 2020
ER -