Exploiting ferroelectric FETs for low-power non-volatile logic-in-memory circuits

Numerous research efforts are targeting new devices that could continue performance scaling trends associated with Moore's Law and/or accomplish computational tasks with less energy. One such device is the ferroelectric FET (FeFET), which offers the potential to be scaled beyond the end of the...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Digest of technical papers - IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer-Aided Design pp. 1 - 8
Main Authors: Xunzhao Yin, Aziz, Ahmedullah, Nahas, Joseph, Datta, Suman, Gupta, Sumeet, Niemier, Michael, Xiaobo Sharon Hu
Format: Conference Proceeding
Language:English
Published: ACM 01.11.2016
Subjects:
Capacitance
Hysteresis
Iron
Magnetic tunneling
Mathematical model
MOSFET
ISSN:1558-2434
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Numerous research efforts are targeting new devices that could continue performance scaling trends associated with Moore's Law and/or accomplish computational tasks with less energy. One such device is the ferroelectric FET (FeFET), which offers the potential to be scaled beyond the end of the silicon roadmap as predicted by ITRS. Furthermore, the I ds vs. V gs characteristics of FeFETs may allow a device to function as both a switch and a non-volatile storage element. We exploit this FeFET property to enable fine-grained logic-in-memory (LiM). We consider three different circuit design styles for FeFET-based LiM: complementary (differential), dynamic current mode, and dynamic logic. Our designs are compared with existing approaches for LiM (i.e., based on magnetic tunnel junctions (MTJs), CMOS, etc.) that afford the same circuit-level functionality. Assuming similar feature sizes, non-volatile FeFET-based LiM circuits are more efficient than functional equivalents based on MTJs when considering metrics such as propagation delay (2.9×, 6.8×) and dyanmic power (3.7×, 2.3×) (for 45 nm, 22 nm technology respectively). Compared to CMOS functional equivalents, FeFET designs still exhibit modest improvements in the aforementioned metrics while also offering non-volatility and reduced device count.
ISSN:1558-2434
DOI:10.1145/2966986.2967037