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Imbalance-Tolerant Bit-Line Sense Amplifier for Dummy-Less Open Bit-Line Scheme in DRAM
- Source :
- IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems I: Regular Papers. 68:2546-2554
- Publication Year :
- 2021
- Publisher :
- Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), 2021.
-
Abstract
- In a conventional open bit-line scheme of DRAM, the edge subarrays (MATs) located at both ends of the cell array block contain alternated real and dummy bit-lines, unavoidably leading to an additional area overhead. To reduce the area overhead, one edge MAT can be eliminated by converting the dummy bit-lines of the other edge MAT into real bit-lines. This strategy causes the conventional bit-line sense amplifiers (BLSAs) in the MATs located at both ends of the cell array block to have a much smaller complementary bit-line capacitance than a true bit-line capacitance. Thus, the sensing operation of a conventional BLSA with this unbalanced bit-line capacitance experiences various problems: sensing voltage decrease, data flipping, and asymmetric equalization. To solve these problems, we propose a novel sensing circuit that can operate effectively even under unbalanced bit-line capacitance, thus suggesting the possibility of an open bit-line scheme without dummy bit-lines. Our proposed dummy-less open bit-line scheme can save approximately 4% of the array height. Compared with the conventional unbalanced BLSA, the proposed BLSA increases the sensing voltage by more than 100%, reduces the voltage peaks by 30% during the data transfer, and reduces equalization time by 1.2 ns in HSPICE Monte Carlo simulation.
- Subjects :
- Computer science
business.industry
Sense amplifier
Amplifier
020208 electrical & electronic engineering
Electrical engineering
Hardware_PERFORMANCEANDRELIABILITY
02 engineering and technology
Sense (electronics)
Capacitance
Hardware_INTEGRATEDCIRCUITS
0202 electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering
Overhead (computing)
Electrical and Electronic Engineering
business
Dram
Voltage
Block (data storage)
Subjects
Details
- ISSN :
- 15580806 and 15498328
- Volume :
- 68
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Journal :
- IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems I: Regular Papers
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi...........1948f7881559cc86ebfd0ee07ff3e85f
- Full Text :
- https://doi.org/10.1109/tcsi.2021.3063183