SRAM methodology for yield and power efficiency: per-element selectable supplies and memory reconfiguration schemes

Authors:
Rouwaida Kanj;Rajiv Joshi;Zhuo Li;JB Kuang;Hung Ngo;Ying Zhou;Weiping Shi;Sani Nassif
Affiliations:
IBM, Austin, TX, USA;IBM, Yorktown Heights, TX, USA;IBM, Austin, TX, USA;IBM, Austin, TX, USA;IBM, Austin, TX, USA;Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA;Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA;IBM, Austin, TX, USA
Venue:
Proceedings of the 13th international symposium on Low power electronics and design
Year:
2008

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Abstract

We present a novel power-aware yield enhancement design methodology and reconfiguration scheme for deep submicron SRAM designs. We show that with the continued trend of raising array supply to counter process variations, it is more effective to use a per-element selectable virtual power-supply scenario as opposed to single array supply with traditional redundancy schemes. The element can be a bank, a sub-array, or an independent row/column, and the element's virtual supply value is determined based on fail bitmaps. The technique can also be used in conjunction with traditional redundancy schemes to further improve the efficiency. The supply and redundancy assignments can be obtained by relying on memory reconfiguration algorithms. For this, we propose a greedy yet accurate algorithm that runs in O(nlogn) as opposed to average case O(n2) traditional algorithms. The methodology leads to significant power savings ranging from 20% to 50% for 65nm technology. We expect the savings to increase in future technologies as leakage powers dominate. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time such a methodology is applied to SRAM designs.