Analyzing static and dynamic write margin for nanometer SRAMs

Abstract

This paper analyzes write ability for SRAM cells in deeply scaled technologies, focusing on the relationship between static and dynamic write margin metrics. Reliability has become a major concern for SRAM designs in modern technologies. Both local mismatch and scaled VDD degrade read stability and write ability. Several static approaches, including traditional SNM, BL margin, and the N-curve method, can be used to measure static write margin. However, static approaches cannot indicate the impact of dynamic dependencies on cell stability. We propose to analyze dynamic write ability by considering the write operation as a noise event that we analyze using dynamic stability criteria. We also define dynamic write ability as the critical pulse width for a write. By using this dynamic criterion, we evaluate the existing static write margin metrics at normal and scaled supply voltages and assess their limitations. The dynamic write time metric can also be used to improve the accuracy of VCCmin estimation for active VDD scaling designs.