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Fundamental Bounds on Power Reduction during Data-Retention in Standby SRAM (2007)
| Content Provider | CiteSeerX |
|---|---|
| Author | Kumar, A. Qin, H. Ishwar, P. Rabaey, J. Ramchandran, K. |
| Abstract | We study leakage-power reduction in standby random access memories (SRAMs) during data-retention. An SRAM cell requires a minimum critical supply voltage (DRV) above which it preserves the stored-bit reliably. Due to processvariations, the intra-chip DRV exhibits variation with a distribution having a diminishing tail. In order to minimize leakage power while preserving data reliably, existing low-power design methods use a worst-case standby supply voltage. This worstcase voltage is larger than the highest DRV among all cells in an SRAM. In contrast, our approach uses aggressive voltage reduction and counters the ensuing unreliability by an errorcontrol code based memory architecture. Using this approach, we explore fundamental trade-offs between power reduction and redundancy present in the SRAM. We establish fundamental bounds on the power reduction in terms of the DRV-distribution using techniques from information theory and algebraic coding theory. For an experimental test-chip DRV-distribution in the 90nm CMOS technology, we show that 49 % power reduction with respect to (w.r.t.) the worst-case is a fundamental lower bound while 40 % power reduction w.r.t. the worst-case is achievable by using a practical algebraic coding scheme. We also study the power reduction as a function of the block-length for low-latency codes since most applications using SRAM are latency constrained. We propose a reliable low-power memory architecture based on the Hamming code for the next test-chip implementation with a predicted power reduction of 33 % while accounting for coding overheads. |
| File Format | |
| Publisher Date | 2007-01-01 |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Subject Keyword | Power Reduction Fundamental Bound Standby Sram Redundancy Present Design Method Errorcontrol Code Cmos Technology Stored-bit Reliably Minimum Critical Supply Voltage Leakage Power Next Test-chip Implementation Hamming Code Experimental Test-chip Drv-distribution Aggressive Voltage Reduction Reliable Low-power Memory Architecture Fundamental Trade-off Intra-chip Drv Sram Cell Practical Algebraic Predicted Power Reduction Worst-case Standby Supply Voltage Algebraic Coding Theory Information Theory Low-latency Code Standby Random Access Memory Memory Architecture Worstcase Voltage |
| Content Type | Text |
