Low-Power Variation-Tolerant Nonvolatile Lookup Table Design

Low-Power Variation-Tolerant Nonvolatile Lookup Table Design

Abstract:

Emerging nonvolatile memories (NVMs), such as MRAM, PRAM, and RRAM, have been widely investigated to replace SRAM as the configuration bits in field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) for high security and instant power ON. However, the variations inherent in NVMs and advanced logic process bring reliability issue to FPGAs. This brief introduces a low-power variation-tolerant nonvolatile lookup table (nvLUT) circuit to overcome the reliability issue. Because of large R_OFF/R_ON, 1T1R RRAM cell provides sufficient sense margin as a configuration bit and a reference resistor. A single-stage sense amplifier with voltage clamp is employed to reduce the power and area without impairing the reliability. Matched reference path is proposed to reduce the parasitic RC mismatch for reliable sensing. Evaluation shows that 22% reduction in delay, 38% reduction in power, and the tolerance of variations of 2.5× typical R_ON or R_OFF in reliability are achieved for proposed nvLUT with six inputs.

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