BTI impact on SRAM sense amplifier

Abstract

Bias Temperature Instability (BTI) - Negative BTI in PMOS and Positive BTI in NMOS transistors-has become a key reliability bottleneck in the nano-scaled era. This paper presents BTI impact on SRAM's sense amplifier of different technologies, a robust sense amplifier has a lower sensing delay and higher sensing voltage. The results show that as technology scales down (i.e., from 90nm to 65nm, and 45nm), BTI impact on sensing delay increases, while that on the sensing voltage decreases, causing the sense amplifier memory, hence to be less robust and reliable. In addition, the paper also investigate the use of supply voltage to reduce the BTI degradation. The result show that increasing the power supply can reduce the sense amplifier BTI degradadtion with 33% for sensing voltage and with 18% for sensing delay; leading to clear tradeoff engineering question between power and robustness.