Digital and Memory Circuits in nano-scale CMOS Technologies

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Realization of robust integrated circuits in state of the art technologies is becoming increasingly difficult. The technology scaling makes transistors susceptible to process variations, and improper functioning of a single transistor may lead to the chip failure containing several million transistors. Often small as possible transistor sizes are used to reduce power, energy consumption, and to increase the packing density. Unfortunately, transistors with smaller dimensions exhibit a higher susceptibility to process variation. In particular, low-voltage, low-power Static Random Access Memory (SRAM) circuits show higher degree of variation owing to smallest possible transistor dimensions. In this research, we will investigate variability-aware design of digital, SRAM circuits in power and voltage constrained environments. In microprocessors up to 70-80% of transistors are in SRAMs. As a consequence, various aspects of Systems on Chip (SoC) - power, energy, yield, quality, and reliability are influenced by SRAMs.