Timing control degradation and NBTI/PBTI tolerant design for Write-replica circuit in nanoscale CMOS SRAM

The threshold voltage (V
T
) drifts caused by Negative-Bias Temperature Instability (NBTI) and Positive-Bias Temperature Instability (PBTI) degrade stability, margin, and performance of nanoscale SRAM over the lifetime of usage. Moreover, most state-of-the-art SRAMs employ replica timing control scheme to mitigate the effects of excessive leakage and variation, and NBTI/PBTI induced V
T
drifts can render the scheme ineffective or even useless. In this paper, we investigate impacts of NBTI and PBTI on SRAM Write operations based on PTM 32nm CMOS technology node poly-gate and high-k metal-gate models. We propose an NBTI/PBTI tolerant Write-replica timing control scheme to mitigate Write margin and performance degradation. By using multi-bank architecture and biasing the virtual supply line of inactive timing-critical circuits to GND to minimize the stress time and maximize the “Recovery” period, the NBTI/PBTI induced SRAM Write performance degradation can be reduced by around 32–48%.