A Bit-Line Boosting Technique for Fast Bit-Line Computation without Read Disturbance

Abstract

SRAM-based In-Memory Computing (IMC) is one of the most promising technique to overcome the innate problems of von-Neumann architecture. However, simultaneously accessing multiple data results in inevitable read disturbance issue. To overcome this drawback, most of the previous works employ Word-Line Under-Drive (WLUD) technique in which Word-Line (WL) driver voltage is lowered. However, WLUD necessarily weakens the access transistors, consequently impairing the performance of the architecture. In this article, new design technique which involves short WL pulse and Bit-Line (BL) boosting scheme is introduced. The proposed architecture does not require much area overhead since it only needs a circuit consisting of only 4 transistors parallelly added to BL. With the proposed technique applied, BL discharge time was shortened to 16.4% at most compared to the conventional architecture.