1. Enabling Energy-Efficient Nonvolatile Computing With Negative Capacitance FET.
- Author
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Li, Xueqing, Sampson, John, Khan, Asif, Ma, Kaisheng, George, Sumitha, Aziz, Ahmedullah, Gupta, Sumeet Kumar, Salahuddin, Sayeef, Chang, Meng-Fan, Datta, Suman, and Narayanan, Vijaykrishnan
- Subjects
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FIELD-effect transistors , *HYSTERESIS , *FERROELECTRIC materials , *ELECTRIC power failures , *ENERGY harvesting - Abstract
Negative capacitance FETs (NCFETs) have attracted significant interest due to their steep-switching capability at a low voltage and the associated benefits for implementing energy-efficient Boolean logic. While most existing works aim to avoid the ID – VG hysteresis in NCFETs, this paper exploits this hysteresis feature for logic-memory synergy and presents a custom-designed nonvolatile NCFET D flip-flop (DFF) that maintains its state during power outages. This paper also presents an NCFET fabricated for this purpose, showing <10 mV/decade steep hysteresisedges and high, up to seven orders inmagnitude, R\text {DS} ratio between the two polarization states. With a device-circuit codesign that takes advantage of the embedded nonvolatility and the high R\text {DS} ratio, the proposed DFF consumes negligible static current in backup and restore operations, and remains robust even with significant global and local ferroelectric material variations across a wide 0.3–0.8 V supply voltage range. Therefore, the proposed DFF achieves energy-efficient and low-latency backup and restore operations. Furthermore, it has an ultralow energy-delay overhead, below 2.1% in normal operations, and operates using the same voltage supply as the Boolean logic elements with which it connects. This promises energy-efficient nonvolatile computing in energy-harvesting and power-gating applications. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]
- Published
- 2017
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