Modeling of the self-heating in STTRAM and analysis of its impact on reliable memory operations

This work presents modeling of the self-heating effect in Spin Torque Transfer RAMs (STTRAM) and analyzes its impact on the functional reliability. We perform computational fluid dynamics based 3-D thermal simulation in Fluent^© for STTRAM at 90 nm technology and characterize the thermal profile considering write condition. The thermal analysis is connected to device and circuit simulators to estimate the effect of self-heating on two functional reliability metrics - read margin and sensing accuracy.