A 40-nm 256-Kb 0.6-V operation half-select resilient 8T SRAM with sequential writing technique enabling 367-mV VDDmin reduction

This paper introduces a novel half-select resilient dual write wordline 8T (DW8T) SRAM with a sequential writing technique. The process scaling increases random variation that degrades SRAM operating margins, for which the proposed DW8T cell presents two features: half-VDD precharging write bitlines and dual write wordlines. The dual write wordlines are sequentially activated in a write cycle, and its combination with the half-VDD precharge suppresses the half-select problem. The DW8T SRAM with the sequential writing technique improve a half-select bit error rate by 71% at the disturb worst corner (FS, 125°C) and by 79% at a typical corner (CC, 25°C) over the conventional 8T, respectively. We implemented a 256-Kb DW8T SRAM and a half-VDD generator on a single chip in a 40-nm CMOS process. The measurement results of the seven samples show that the proposed DW8T SRAM achieves a VDD
_min
of 600 mV and improves the average VDD
_min
by 367 mV compared to the conventional 8T SRAM. The measured leakage power can be reduced by 25%.