Low-Vt small-offset gated preamplifier for sub-1V gigabit DRAM arrays

A sensing scheme with temporary activation of a low-V
t
gated preamplifier (LGA) achieves fast sensing, fast local I/O driving and low-leakage operation simultaneously even for low-voltage mid-point sensing. The features are verified with a 70nm 128Mb DRAM core that demonstrates 16.4ns row access (t
RCD
) and 14.3ns read access (t
AA
) at an array voltage of 0.9V. The LGA is promising for future sub-1V gigabit DRAMs because it reduces variation in threshold voltage (V
t
) of MOSFETs and in the offset voltage of sense amplifiers.