Variation-Tolerant Separated Pre-Charge Sense Amplifier for Resistive Non-Volatile logic circuit

Abstract

Due to limited scalability and leakage power of CMOS-based logic circuit, Spin Transfer Torque (STT) device, which has the characteristics of a low area, zero leakage power, nonvolatile and infinite endurance, is one of the strongest candidates to overcome limitations of CMOS. Based on these characteristics, efforts have been made to develop STT-device logic circuit. However, STT-device logic circuit has encountered the problem of read reliability. To address read reliability issue, we propose a new Sense amplifier, named variation-tolerant separated precharge sense amplifier. This circuit, by using transmission gate and feedback, is resilient to process variation and has high read reliability. Simulation using the 65nm process is conducted to show the performance of the proposed sensing circuit. Simulation results demonstrate that the reading error rate of the proposed sense amplifier decreased by 68% and 37% respectively, compared to the conventional SPCSA and RESPCSA.