A Single-Ended Offset-Compensating Bit-Line Sense-Amplifier With Ground Precharge and Charge Transfer Pre Sensing for Sub-1V DRAM

Abstract

This letter presents a single-ended offset-compensating (SEOC) with ground precharge bit-line sense amplifier (BLSA). It uses a ground (GND) precharge (PRE) configuration to overcome its limited headroom margin. The single-ended topology that exploits a charge-transfer amplification can eliminate a redundant edge blocks and additional reference circuitry for GND PRE, while maintaining energy efficiency. It is fabricated in a 25-nm DRAM process and compared with offset-compensation sense amplifier (OCSA). The proposed BLSA can achieve 98% decrease in fail bit count (FBC) compared to OCSA at 0.8 V supply voltage and achieve less than 1% performance degradation without redundant edge blocks.