Up to 45% Faster Supply Boosted Voltage Sense Amplifier (SBVSA) for High-Speed SRAMs

The performance of Sense Amplifiers (SAs) is critical to high-speed SRAMs. Large-offset and slow-resolving SAs can create a bottleneck in the SRAM performance at low voltages because of which a lot of emphasis is laid on designing faster SAs, often at the cost of area. In this brief, we propose a variation-tolerant Supply Boosted Voltage Sense Amplifier (SBVSA) that is up to 45% faster at $5\sigma $ than a Conventional Voltage Sense Amplifier (CVSA) in 22nm CMOS technology. This gain is achieved with an area overhead of less than 1% in SRAM instances while improving the read performance of the instances by up to 9% in 22nm CMOS.