PXC 3873796
PXC 3873796
PXC 3873796
=
(1)
Where,
8 . 1 2
e V
L
W
Cox I
o u
|
.
|
\
|
=
As the supply voltage (V
DD
) is being uniformly scaled
down with successive technology nodes. The transistor delay is
inversely proportional to the difference of supply and threshold
voltage [10], the threshold voltage must also be scaled down
proportionally with each technology node to maintain the circuit
performance. This leads to an exponential increase in sub-
threshold leakage current. As seen from Eq.1, increasing the
threshold voltage (V
t
) of the transistor is an effective way to
reduce sub-threshold leakage.
4. A REVIEW OF RELATED WORK
In general, the SRAM is being considered as the systems of
Low-Activity Factor. Researchers in the static memory design
domain have reported several integrated circuit and architecture
level approaches to address the power and performance in deep-
sub-micron CMOS technologies.
In [11], G.Razavipore, et.al., proposed the PP SRAM Bit -Cell
structure where the two nMOS access transistors has been
replaced by the two High-V
t
pMOS access transistors by
considering the view that the gate leakage (gate oxide direct
tunneling) current will be lower than that of the leakage offered
by the nMOS transistors in the ideal mode of the bit-cell. It
utilizes the Dual Threshold Voltage technology with Forward
Body Biasing (FBB) to reduce the sub-threshold leakage without
loosing the performance. As compared to the conventional 6T
SRAM Bit-cell, this work reduces the total gate leakage current
by 27% and the idle power by 37% with no access time
degradation and an improvement in the SNM by 15% in 45nm
CMOS technology at V
DD
= 0.8V.
In [12], B. Amelifard, et.al., proposed an architecture of the
SRAM Bit-cell by inserting an extra nMOS transistor in
between the ground line and SRAM cell, called as the Gated-
Ground technique to reduce the leakage power consumption in
the high performance cache memories with single V
t
(transistor
threshold voltage) process. The turning OFF of the Gated-
Ground transistor gives large reduction in leakage power. This
technique requires no extra circuitry, i.e., the row decoder itself
can be used to control the Gated-Ground transistor. At the
simulation level on 100nm and 70nm, leakage power
consumption is achieved at 16.5% and 27% in L1 cache and
50% and 47% reduction in L2 cache with less than 5% impact
on execution time and within 4% increase in area overhead.
In [13], K. Nil, et.al., proposed Multiple Threshold CMOS
Technique (MT-CMOS) to influence the leakage current. In the
active mode of the operation of the memory cell, the low
threshold voltage is preferred because of the higher performance
(speed). However, in the standby mode of operation, high
threshold voltage is useful for reduction of the leakage power.
Therefore, if transistors can be set to different threshold
voltages, most likely using Reverse-Body-Bias (RBB), the
threshold voltage can be set according to different modes of
operation of the memory. At the time of accessing the that is in
the Standby mode, it has some overheads, as the threshold
voltage must be returned to the proper level before the value can
be read.
5. PROPOSED WORK P3 SRAM BIT
CELL
International Journal of Computer Applications (0975 8887)
Volume 23 No.7, June 2011
26
In this work, a novel architecture called as the P3 SRAM Bit -
Cell Scheme has been proposed for the reduction of the active
and standby leakage power through the gate and sub-threshold
leakage reduction in the active and standby mode of the memory
operation. In it a gated-ground pMOS transistor (typical) has
been used with the PP SRAM Bit -Cell structure [11]. The two
pMOS access transistors reduce the gate leakage (gate oxide
direct tunneling) current. This current will be lower than that of
the leakage offered by the nMOS transistors in the ideal mode of
the bit-cell due to the high barrier width of the pMOS in
comparison with the nMOS transistor. Full supply body biasing
is being used to reduce the sub-threshold leakage without
loosing the cells performance. As the gated transistor is of
minimum feature size, so the area penalty is minimum in terms
of a large memory and can be compromised. The extra pMOS
transistor between the cell and ground, produces the stacking
effect in conjunction with bit-cell. When the Gated-pMOS is
turned off, opposes the leakage current flow through it.
Fig. 4. The proposed P3 SRAM Bit-Cell
When WL = 0, the bit-cell behaves as the normal bit-cell and
ready to perform the read/write operation in the active mode
operation. When WL = 1, bit-cell is in the OFF state and puts
the memory in the standby mode to hold data. To the best of my
knowledge, pMOS Gated-Ground and full-supply voltage body
bias for pMOS transistor along with the PP SRAM bit -cell
structure is used for the first time in the memory bit -cell design
to reduce the power in 45nm CMOS technology at V
DD
= 0.7V
and 0.8V.
6. SIMULATION WORK
The simulation work is being performed at the Cadence-
Virtuoso Sch. and Spectre-AMS Designer platform at CMOS
Technology, pdk 45nm for t
ox
= 2.4nm, V
th
= 2.2V, at V
DD
=
0.7V, and 0.8V and T =25
0
C when Active Data for Write 0
and 1 and Standby Stored Data 0 and 1, shown in Fig. 5-8.
Active Power for Data Write '0' and '1' Vdd = 0.7V
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Conventional 6T
PP
P3
C
e
l
l
T
o
p
o
l
o
g
y
Power (uW)
Active '1'
Active '0'
Fig. 5. Active Power Consumption when Write Data is 0 at
V
DD
= 0.7V.
Active Power Consumption for Data '0' and '1' at Vdd = 0.8V
0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14
Conventional 6T
PP
P3
C
e
l
l
T
o
p
o
l
o
g
y
Power (uW)
Active '1'
Active '0'
Fig. 6. Active Power Consumption when Hold Data is 1 at V
DD
= 0.8V.
Leakage Power Consumption for Data '0' and '1' for Vdd = 0.7V
0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14
Conventional 6T
PP
P3
C
e
l
l
T
o
p
o
l
o
g
y
Power (uW)
Leakage '1'
Leakage '0'
Fig. 7. Leakage Power Consumption when Hold Data is 0 at
V
DD
= 0.7V.
Leakage Power Consumption for Data '0' and '1' at Vdd = 0.8V
0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16
Conventional 6T
PP
P3
C
e
l
l
T
o
p
o
l
o
g
y
Power (uW)
Leakage '1'
Leakage '0'
Fig. 8. Active Power Consumption when Write Data is 1 at
V
DD
= 0.8V.
International Journal of Computer Applications (0975 8887)
Volume 23 No.7, June 2011
27
7. CONCLUSIONS
In this paper, a novel structure of the SRAM Bit -Cell, called as
Stacked-pMOS PP SRAM Bit-Cell (or simply called as P3-
SRAM Bit-Cell) structure, is presented. The proposed bit -cell
utilizes the Gated-Ground
technique for transistor stacking, PP-
SRAM Cell, and full-supply body-biasing to reduce the active
and standby power in the memory. It is found that P3 scheme
effectively reduces the leakage power while maintaining the cell
performance at 45nm CMOS technology node with a little area
penalty of gated transistor. As the gated transistor is of
minimum feature size, so the area penalty is minimum in terms
of a large memory. In comparison with the conventional and PP
SRAM Bit-cells, the active power is achieved for Data write 0
as 89.21% , 94.38%, and for Data write 1 as 89.23%, 94.45%,
respectively at V
DD
= 0.7V. When the V
DD
= 0.8V, the active
power is achieved for Data write 0 as 9.15%, 93.63%, and for
Data write 1 as 91.68%, 93.59%, respectively. Also, in
comparison with the conventional and PP SRAM Bit -cells, the
leakage power is achieved for Data Hold 0 as 44.30%, 46.67%,
and for Data Hold 1 as 51.83%, 61.67%, respectively at V
DD
=
0.7V. When the V
DD
= 0.8V, the leakage power is achieved for
Data Hold 0 as 38.82%, 42.84%, and for Data Hold 1 as
43.23%, 53.10%, respectively. The work is performed for t
ox
=
2.4nm, V
th
= 2.2V, Cadence pdk 45nm, at V
DD
= 0.7V, and 0.8V
at T =25
0
C when Active Data for Write 0 and 1 and Standby
Hold Data 0 and 1.
8. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
The authors are grateful to their respective organizations for
their encouragement and support.
9. REFERENCES
[1] Neeraj Kr. Shukla, R.K. Singh, and Manisha Pattanaik,
Design and Analysis of a Novel Low-Power SRAM Bit-
Cell Structure at Deep-Sub-Micron CMOS Technology for
Mobile Multimedia Applications, International Journal of
Advanced Computer Science and Applications (IJACSA),
USA, Vol.2, Issue 5, May, 2011, pp. 43-49.
[2] International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors.
Online-Available at http://www.publicitrs.net
[3] K. M. Kao, et. al., BSIM4 Gate Leakage Model Including
Source-Drain Partition, in Proc. Int. Electron Devices
Meeting, Dec. 2000, pp. 815818.
[4] Kevin Zhang, Uddalak Bhattacharya, Zhanping Chen, Fatih
Hamzaoglu, Daniel Murray, Narendra Vallepalli, Yih
Wang,B. Zheng, and Mark Bohr, SRAM Design on 65-nm
CMOS Technology with Dynamic Sleep Transistor for
Leakage Reduction IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits,
Vol. 40, No. 4, APRIL 2005, pp. 895-901.
[5] B.S. Deepaksubramanyan and Adrian Nunez, Analysis of
Subthreshold Leakage Reduction in CMOS Digital
Circuits, Proceedings of the 13
th
NASA VLSI Symposium,
Post Falls, IDAHO, USA, June 5-6, 2007, pp 1-8.
[6] Neeraj Kr. Shukla, Shilpi Birla, R.K. Singh, and Manisha
Pattanaik, Speed and Leakage Power Trade-off in Various
SRAM Circuits, International Journal of Computer and
Electrical Engineering (IJCEE), Singapore, Vol.3, No.2,
Apr. 2011, pp. 244-249.
[7] Sung-Mo (Steve) Kang, Yusuf Leblebici, CMOS Digital
Integrated Circuits-Analysis and Design, Third Edition
Tata McGraw-Hill Edition, New Delhi, India.
[8] Y. Taur and T. H. Ning, Fundamentals of Modern VLSI
Devices. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998, ch. 2,
pp. 9495.
[9] K. Cao,W.-C Lee, W. Liu, X. Jin, P. Su, S. Fung, J. An, B.
Yu, and C. Hu, BSIM4 gate leakage model including
source drain partition, in Tech. Dig. Int. Electron Devices
Meeting, 2000, pp. 815818.
[10] Y. Taur, D. A. Buchanan, W. Chen, D. J. Frank, K. E.
Ismail, S. H. Lo, G. Sai-Halasz, R.Viswanathan, and et al.,
CMOS scaling into nanometer regime, Proc. of the IEEE,
vol. 85, Apr. 1997, pp. 486504.
[11] G. Razavipour, A. Afzali-Kusha, and M. Pedram,
Design and Analysis of Two Low-Power SRAM Cell
Structures, IEEE Transaction on Very Large Scale
Integration (VLSI) Systems, Vol. 17, No. 10, Oct. 2009, pp.
1551-1555.
[12] Behnam Amelifard, Farzan Fallah, and Massoud
Pedram, Reducing the Sub-threshold and Gate-tunneling
Leakage of SRAM Cells using Dual-Vt and Dual-Tox
Assignment, Proceeding of Design, Automation and Test
in Europe, Munich, 2006. Date: 6-10 March 2006, pp. 1-6.
[13] K. Nil, et.al., A Low-Power SRAM using Auto-
Backgate-Controlled MT-CMOS, Proceedings of the
International Symposium on Low-Power Electronics and
Design, Aug. 1998, pp. 293-98.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
1
Neeraj Kr. Shukla (IEEE, IACSIT,IAENG, IETE, IE, CSI,
ISTE,VSI-India), a Ph.D. Scholar at the UK Technical
University, Dehradun (Uttarakhand) India is an Asst. Professor
in the Department of Electrical, Electronics & Communication
Engineering, ITM University, Gurgaon, (Haryana) India. He has
received his M.Tech. (Electronics Engineering) and B.Tech.
(Electronics & Telecommunication Engineering) Degrees from
the J.K. Institute of Applied Physics & Technology, University
of Allahabad, Allahabad (Uttar Pradesh) India in the year of
1998 and 2000, respectively. His main research interests are in
Low-Power Digital VLSI Design and its Multimedia
Applications, Open Source EDA, and RTL Design.
2
R.K. Singh (IAENG, IE, ISTE), Professor in the Department of
Electronics & Communication Engineering, VCT-Kumaon
Engineering College, Dwarahat, Almora (UK) India. He is being
honored with the Ph.D. in Electronics Engineering in the Year
2003 from the University of Allahabad, Allahabad (Uttar
Pradesh), India. He has received his M.E. (Electronics &
Control Engineering) in 1992 from BITS, Pilani, (Rajasthan)
India. He has around thirty five research publications in the
conferences and journals at national and international. He has
also guided eight ME thesis. He has authored seven text -books
in the field of VLSI Design, Basic Electronics, and Opto-
Electronics. He has worked at various capacities in the
International Journal of Computer Applications (0975 8887)
Volume 23 No.7, June 2011
28
Academic domain such as, the Principle, Kumaon Engineering
College, Dwarahat in the year 2003-04, Director (O),
Directorate of Technical Education, Uttaranchal in the year
2005, and Joint Director, State Project Facilitation Unit,
Dehradun for the World Bank TEQIP Project. Apart from his
industrial experience, he contributed as a Scientist and Senior
Scientist in Engineering Research at Central Electronics
Engineering Research Institute (CEERI), Dehradun (UK) India,
with a focus in Fibre Optics Communication and their
subsequent application in optical devices to various other
technologies and VLSI Design and Con Controls (P) Ltd. He is
also the recipient of couple of prestigious awards, e.g., Rastriya
Samman Puruskar, Jewel of India Award, Rastriya Ekta Award,
Life Time Achievement Award, and Arch of Excellence Award.
His current areas of interest are VLSI Design, Opto-Electronics
and its applications.
3
Manisha Pattanaik (IE, ISTE) has been honored the Ph.D.
from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur, India in
the field of VLSI Design from the Department of Electronics
and Electrical Communication Engineering in the year 2004.
Currently she is an Associate Professor (VLSI Group) at ABV-
India Institute of Information Technology & Management
(ABV-IIITM), Gwalior, (Madhya Pradesh), India. She has been
awarded various scholarships, e.g., National Scholarships, Merit
Scholarships and MHRD Fellowships. She shared the
responsibility in the capacity of referee for IEEE International
Conferences on VLSI Design for two consecutive years, 2003-
04. Her areas of interest are Leakage Power Reduction of Nano-
Scale CMOS Circuits, Characterization of Logic Circuit
Techniques for Low-Power/Low-Voltage and High performance
analog & digital VLSI applications and CAD of VLSI Design.