Bio-medical wearable devices restricted to their small-capacity embedded-battery require energy-efficiency of the highest order. However, minimum-energy point (MEP) at sub-threshold voltages is unattainable with SRAM memory, which fails to hold below 0.3V because of its vanishing noise margins. This paper examines minimum-energy operation of 2T and 3T1D e-DRAM gain cells as an alternative to SRAM at 32nm technology node with different design points: up-sizing transistors, using high-Vth transistors, read/write wordline assists and temperature. First, the e-DRAM cells are evaluated without considering any process variations. The design-space is explored by creating a kriging meta-model to reduce the number of simulations. Finally, a full-factorial statistical analysis of e-DRAM cells is performed in presence of threshold voltage variations. The effect on mean MEP is also reported.

Peer Reviewed