Giga Bit급 저전력 synchronous DRAM 구조에 대한 연구

A study on the low power architecture of multi-giga bit synchronous DRAM's

The transient current components of the dRAM are analyzed and the sensing current, data path operation current and DC leakage current are revealed to be the major curretn components. It is expected that the supply voltage of less than 1.5V with low VT MOS witll be used in multi-giga bit dRAM. A low voltage dual VT self-timed CMOS logic in which the subthreshold leakage current path is blocked by a large high-VT MOS is proposed. An active signal at each node of the nature speeds up the signal propagation and enables the synchronous DRAM to adopt a fast pipelining scheme. The sensing current can be reduced by adopting 8 bit prefetch scheme with 1.2V VDD. Although the total cycle time for the sequential 8 bit read is the same as that of the 3.3V conventional DRAM, the sensing current is loered to 0.7mA or less than 2.3% of the current of 3.3V conventional DRAM. 4 stage pipeline scheme is used to rduce the power consumption in the 4 giga bit DRAM data path of which length and RC delay amount to 3 cm and 23.3ns, respectively. A simple wave pipeline scheme is used in the data path where 4 sequential data pulses of 5 ns width are concurrently transferred. With the reduction of the supply voltage from 3.3V to 1.2V, the operation current is lowered from 22mA to 2.5mA while the operation speed is enhanced more than 4 times with 6 ns cycle time.