Layout Synthesis of RRAM Array With Minimized Proximity Effect

Abstract

The lithography process inherently introduces device-to-device variation in the fabrication of resistive random access memory (RRAM) arrays, introducing electrical mismatch and limiting the practical applications of RRAM-based analog computing circuits. In this work, we propose a lithography model-aware layout synthesis framework to minimize the proximity effect in the lithography process, thus reducing the electrical mismatch among these devices for analog computing applications. A dummy RRAM cell insertion technique is proposed to reduce the geometrical mismatch among RRAM cells, and a bi-objective alternate optimization method is proposed to efficiently optimize the geometric parameters and the structure of RRAM layouts. In addition, an approximation method for evaluating the quality of the RRAM array layout is proposed to reduce the runtime of synthesis. The experimental results show that our proposed framework significantly reduces the deviation between printed and expected patterns.