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 the minimum-energy operation point of 2T and 3T1D e-DRAM gain cells at the 32-nm technology node with different design points: up-sizing transistors, using high- V th transistors, read/write wordline assists; as well as operating conditions (i.e., temperature). First, the e-DRAM cells are evaluated without considering any process variations. Then, a full-factorial statistical analysis of e-DRAM cells is performed in the presence of threshold voltage variations and the effect of upsizing on mean MEP is reported. Finally, it is shown that the product of the read and write lengths provides a knob to tradeoff energy-efficiency for reliable MEP energy operation.

Peer Reviewed