Power and area efficient 5T-SRAM with improved performance for low-power SoC in 65nm CMOS

This paper addresses performance and reliability issues in a 5T SRAM cell, and introduces a low power, reliable and high performance design in 65nm technology, which can be used as cache memory in processors and in low-power portable devices. The proposed SRAM cell features ∼13% area reduction compared to a typical 6T cell. In addition, it features a biasing ground line, VSSM, which is charged by channel leakage current from memory cells in standby, and is used to pre-charge a single bit-line and bias the negative supply voltage of each memory cell to suppress standby leakage power. A major standby power reduction is gained compared to conventional 5T and 6T designs and up to ∼30% compared to previous low-power 6T designs. The proposed design has read and static noises margins, as well as write ‘0’ and read performance that are comparable to typical 6T designs. Write ‘1’ is slower by ∼11–31% depending on design choices and can be improved with minor cost of area and power.