Investigation of Static Noise Margin of FinFET SRAM cells in sub-threshold region
- Resource Type
- Conference
- Authors
- Fan, Ming-Long; Wu, Yu-Sheng; Hu, Vita Pi-Ho; Su, Pin; Chuang, Ching-Te
- Source
- 2009 IEEE International SOI Conference SOI Conference, 2009 IEEE International. :1-2 Oct, 2009
- Subject
- Components, Circuits, Devices and Systems
Engineered Materials, Dielectrics and Plasmas
Nuclear Engineering
Photonics and Electrooptics
FinFETs
Random access memory
Voltage control
Analytical models
Degradation
Circuit stability
Poisson equations
Instruments
Wireless sensor networks
Circuit synthesis
- Language
- ISSN
- 1078-621X
This paper investigates the Static Noise Margin (SNM) of FinFET SRAM cells operating in sub-threshold region using analytical solution of 3D Poisson's equation. An analytical SNM model for sub-threshold FinFET SRAM is demonstrated and validated by TCAD mixed-mode simulations. The stabilities of several novel independently controlled-gate FinFET SRAM cells are examined. Significant nominal RSNM improvements are observed in these novel cells. However, Write-ability is degraded and becomes an important concern for certain configurations in sub-threshold region. Our result indicates that R/W word-line (WL) voltage control technique is more effective than transistor sizing for improving the Write-ability of the FinFET sub-threshold SRAM. While 6T cell is not a viable candidate for sub-threshold SRAM and 8T/10T cells must be used in bulk CMOS, our analysis establishes the feasibility and viability of 6T FinFET cells for sub-threshold SRAM applications.