BGIM: Bit-Grained Instant-on Memory Cell for Sleep Power Critical Mobile Applications
Soheil Salehi, Ronald F. DeMara · 2018
This paper devises a novel energy-aware Non-Volatile Static Random Access Memory (NV-SRAM) framework for sleep power critical mobile applications. The beyond-Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) hardware architecture has been designed to minimize the overall static and leakage energy consumption while providing fast back-up and restore operations. Differential Spin-Hall Effect Magnetic Random Access Memory devices are utilized to realize the proposed framework called Bit-Grained Instant-on Memory Cell (BGIM). Our results indicate that the proposed BGIM consumes 121.51fJ on average for each back-up operation and 1.56fJ on average for each restore operation. Furthermore, the proposed BGIM can perform rapid back-up operations in 1ns and fast restore operations in 13.2ps. Moreover, the proposed BGIM cell incurs 0.4μm^2 area overhead compared to the traditional 6T SRAM cell, however it eliminates the need for data transmission and a separate non-volatile memory macro.