Skip to main content
    Details
    Author(s)
    Display Name
    Yuhao Shu
    Affiliation
    Affiliation
    ShanghaiTech University
    Display Name
    Hongtu Zhang
    Affiliation
    Affiliation
    ShanghaiTech University
    Display Name
    Hao Sun
    Affiliation
    Display Name
    Qi Deng
    Affiliation
    Affiliation
    ShanghaiTech University
    Display Name
    Yajun Ha
    Affiliation
    Affiliation
    ShanghaiTech University
    Abstract

    Gain-cell based eDRAM is an appealing candidate as the main memory in cryogenic computing for its high density and low power consumption. However, existing cryogenic memories fail to achieve higher energy efficiency due to the higher energy consumption in either the retention or dynamic access operations. To solve this issue, we propose three techniques to achieve a 16Kb energy-efficient CSDB-eDRAM for cryogenic memory implementation. First, we propose a 4T CSDB-GC that is able to significantly improve the retention time. Second, we propose a wordline voltage off-chip tunning method to enhance the dual-port read speed and read-disturb free operations. Third, we introduce a bitline split scheme to reduce the dynamic power overhead of each access operation. Measurement results from our fabricated chip show that the dynamic power of our CSDB-eDRAM has been reduced to 49.23 uW/Kb at 1.41 GHz, which outperforms the state-of-the-art by 11.4x. It also achieves the best data retention time of 16.67 s at 4.2 K. Moreover, a negligible retention power of 0.11 pW/Kb can be achieved.