• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.41 no.8
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• pp.93-98
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• 2004

A low power SRAM using elevated source level memory cells is proposed to save the write power of SRAM. It reduces the swing voltages of the bit lines and data bus by elevating the source level of the memory cells from GND to $V_{T}$ and lowering the precharge level of the bit lines and data bus from $V_{DD}$ to $V_{DD}$ - $V_{T}$. It saves the write power of SRAM without area overhead and speed degradation. An SRAM with 8K${\times}$32bits is fabricated in a 0.25um CMOS process. It saves 45% of the power in write cycles at 300MHz with 2.5V. The maximum operating frequency is 330MHz.

• The Journal of the Korea institute of electronic communication sciences
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.291-298
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• 2023

SRAM-based in-memory computing is one of the technologies to solve the bottleneck of von Neumann architecture. In order to achieve SRAM-based in-memory computing, it is essential to design efficient SRAM bit-cell. In this paper, we propose a low-power differential sensing 8+T SRAM bit-cell which reduces power consumption and improves circuit performance. The proposed 8+T SRAM bit-cell is applied to ripple carry adder which performs SRAM read and bitwise operations simultaneously and executes each logic operation in parallel. Compared to the previous work, the designed 8+T SRAM-based ripple carry adder is reduced power consumption by 11.53%, but increased propagation delay time by 6.36%. Also, this adder is reduced power-delay-product (PDP) by 5.90% and increased energy-delay- product (EDP) by 0.08%. The proposed circuit was designed using TSMC 65nm CMOS process, and its feasibility was verified through SPECTRE simulation.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.46 no.5
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• pp.25-31
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• 2009

A low power SRAM using supply voltage charge recycling (SVCR-SRAM) scheme is proposed. It divides into two SRAM cell blocks and supplies two different powers. A supplied power is $V_{DD}$ and $V_{DD}/2$. The other is $V_{DD}/2$ and GND. When N-bit cells are accessed, the charge used in N/2-bit cells with VDD and $V_{DD}/2$ is recycled in the other N/2-bit cells with $V_{DD}/2$ and GND. The SVCR scheme is used in the power consuming parts which bit line, data bus, word line, and SRAM cells to reduce dynamic power. The other parts of SRAM use $V_{DD}$ and GND to achieve high speed. Also, the SVCR-SRAM results in reducing leakage power of SRAM cells due to the body-effect. A 64K-bit SRAM ($8K{\times}8$bits) is implemented in a $0.18{\mu}m$ CMOS process. It saves 57.4% write power and 27.6% read power at $V_{DD}=1.8V$ and f=50MHz.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.49 no.8
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• pp.10-15
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• 2012

This letter proposes a low-leakage SRAM using power-gating and voltage-level control. The power-gating scheme significantly reduces leakage power by shutting off the power supply to blank memory cell blocks. The voltage-level control scheme saves leakage power by raising the ground line voltage of SRAM cells and word line decoders in data-stored memory cell blocks. A $4K{\times}8bit$ SRAM chip was fabricated using a 1.2V $0.13{\mu}m$ CMOS process. The leakage powers are $1.23{\sim}9.87{\mu}W$ and $1.23{\sim}3.01{\mu}W$ for 0~100% memory usage in active and sleep modes, respectively. During the sleep mode, the proposed SRAM consumes 12.5~30.5% leakage power compared to the conventional SRAM.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.50 no.11
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• pp.117-123
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• 2013

By exploiting the regular read and write access patterns of embedded SRAM memories inside Viterbi decoder, the memory architecture can be efficiently modified to reduce the power consumption of write operation. According to the experimental results with 65nm CMOS process, the proposed embedded memory used for Viterbi decoder achieves 30.84% of power savings with 8.92% of area overhead compared to the conventional embedded SRAM approaches.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Telematics and Electronics C
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• v.35C no.2
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• pp.36-47
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• 1998

Low power circuit techniques have been developed to realize the highest possible performance of embedded SRAM at 1V power supply with$0.5\mu\textrm{m}$ single threshold CMOS technology in which the unbalance between NMOS and PMOS threshold voltages is utilized to optimize the low power CMOS IC design. To achieve the best trade-off between the transistor drivability and the subthreshold current increase, the ground potential of memory array is raised to suppressthe subthreshold current. The problems of lower cellstability and bit-line dealy increase due to the enhanced array ground potential are evaluated to be controlled within the allowable range by careful circuit design. 160MHz, 128kb embedded SRAM with 3.4ns access time is demonstrated with the power consumption of 14.8mW in active $21.4{mu}W$ in standby mode at 1V power supply.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.47 no.3
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• pp.7-17
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• 2010

In this paper, an innovative low-power SRAM based on 4-transistor latch cell is described. The memory cells are composed of two cross-coupled inverters without access transistors. The sources of PMOS transistors are connected to bitlines while the sources of NMOS transistors are connected to wordlines. They are accessed by totally new read and write method which results in low operating power dissipation in the nature. Moreover, the design reduces the leakage current in the memory cells. The proposed SRAM has been demonstrated through 16-kbit test chip fabricated in a 0.18-${\mu}m$ CMOS process. It shows 17.5 ns access at 1.8-V supply while consuming dynamic power of $87.6\;{\mu}W/MHz$ (for read cycle) and $70.2\;{\mu}W/MHz$ (for write cycle). Compared with those of the conventional 6-transistor SRAM, it exhibits the power reduction of 30 % (read) and 42 % (write) respectively. Silicon measurement also confirms that the proposed SRAM achieves nearly 64 % reduction in the total standby power dissipation. This novel SRAM might be effective in realizing low-power embedded memory in future mobile applications.

• Journal of IKEEE
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• v.21 no.3
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• pp.260-263
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• 2017

Based on several CPU cores, an SoC including ADCs, DC-DC converter and 2M-byte SRAM is proposed in this paper. The CPU core consists of a 12-bit MENSA, a 32-bit Symmetric multi-core processor, as well as 16-bit CDSP. To eliminate the external SDRAM memory, internal 2M-byte SRAM is implemented. Because the SRAM normally occupies huge area, the parasitic components reduce the speed of SoC. In this work, the SRAM blocks are divided into small pieces to reduce the parasitic components. The proposed SoC is developed in a standard 55nm CMOS process and the speed of SoC is 200MHz.

• IEMEK Journal of Embedded Systems and Applications
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.125-131
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• 2018

STT-RAM is attracting as a next generation Non-volatile memory for replacing cache memory with low leakage energy, high integration and memory access performance similar to SRAM. However, there is problem of write operations as the other Non_volatile memory. Hybrid cache memory using SRAM and STT-RAM is attracting attention as a cache memory structure with lowe power consumption. Despite this, reducing the leakage energy consumption by the STT-RAM is still lacking access to the Dynamic energy. In this paper, we proposed as energy management method such as a way-selection approach for hybrid L2 cache fo SRAM and STT-RAM and memory selection method of write/read operation. According to the simulation results, the proposed hybrid cache memory reduced the average energy consumption by 40% on SPEC CPU 2006, compared with SRAM cache memory.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.43 no.3 s.345
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• pp.21-32
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• 2006

A new SRAM circuit with row-by-row activation and low-swing write schemes is proposed to reduce switching power of active cells as well as leakage one of sleep cells in this paper. By driving source line of sleep cells by $V_{SSH}$ which is higher than $V_{SS}$, the leakage current can be reduced to 1/100 due to the cooperation of the reverse body-bias. Drain Induced Barrier Lowering (DIBL), and negative $V_{GS}$ effects. Moreover, the bit line leakage which may introduce a fault during the read operation can be eliminated in this new SRAM. Swing voltage on highly capacitive bit lines is reduced to $V_{DD}-to-V_{SSH}$ from the conventional $V_{DD}-to-V_{SS}$ during the write operation, greatly saving the bit line switching power. Combining the row-by-row activation scheme with the low-swing write does not require the additional area penalty. By the SPICE simulation with the Berkeley Predictive Technology Modes, 93% of leakage power and 43% of switching one are estimated to be saved in future leakage-dominant 70-un process. A test chip has been fabricated using $0.35-{\mu}m$ CMOS process to verify the effectiveness and feasibility of the new SRAM, where the switching power is measured to be 30% less than the conventional SRAM when the I/O bit width is only 8. The stored data is confirmed to be retained without loss until the retention voltage is reduced to 1.1V which is mainly due to the metal shield. The switching power will be expected to be more significant with increasing the I/O bit width.