Mitigation of Sense Amplifier Degradation Using Skewed Design
Daniël Kraak1,a, Mottaqiallah Taouil1,b, Said Hamdioui1,c, Pieter Weckx2,d, Stefan Cosemans2,e and Francky Catthoor2,3,f
1Delft University of Technology Mekelweg 4, 2628 CD Delft, The Netherlands
aD.H.P.Kraak@tudelft.nl
bM.Taouil@tudelft.nl
cS.Hamdioui@tudelft.nl
2imec vzw., Kapeldreef 75, B-3001, Leuven, Belgium
dPieter.Weckx@imec.be
eStefan.Cosemans@imec.be
3Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, ESAT, Belgium
fFrancky.Catthoor@imec.be
ABSTRACT
Designers typically add design margins to semiconductor memories to compensate for aging. However, the aging impact increases with technology downscaling, leading to the need for higher margins. This results into a negative impact on area, yield, performance, and power consumption. As an alternative, mitigation schemes can be developed to reduce such impact. This paper proposes a mitigation scheme for the memory’s sense amplifier (SA); the scheme is based on creating a skew in the relative strengths of the SA’s cross-coupled inverters during design. The skew is compensated by aging due to unbalanced workloads. As a result, the impact of aging on the SA is reduced. To validate the mitigation scheme, the degradation of the sense amplifier is analyzed for several workloads. The experimental results show that the proposed mitigation scheme reduces the degradation of the sense amplifier’s critical figure-of-merit, the offset voltage, with up to 26%.
Keywords: Sense Amplifier, Memory, Aging, Mitigation.
