A bit-line GND sense technique for low-voltage operation FeRAM

Abstract

We propose a sense scheme in which a pMOS charge-transfer maintains the bit-line level near the GND level when the plate line goes high. The scheme supplies 0.5 V higher read-out voltages across the cell capacitors and achieves a 0.4 V higher differential amplitude in a 512-cell per bit-line structure than a conventional DRAM sense scheme. A shifted bias plate line layout enables a minimum number of bit-lines to be activated and achieves 8.06 mW at 3 V, 5 MHz, about same power as a conventional device.