Low-Power Heterogeneous Graphene Nanoribbon-CMOS Multistate Volatile Memory Circuit

Khasanvis, S. and Habib, K. M. M. and Rahman, M. and Lake, R. K. and Moritz, C. A.. (2015) Low-Power Heterogeneous Graphene Nanoribbon-CMOS Multistate Volatile Memory Circuit. Journal on Emerging Technologies in Computing Systems, 12 (2). 15:1-15:18.

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Abstract

Graphene is an emerging nanomaterial believed to be a potential candidate for post-Si nanoelectronics, due to its exotic properties. Recently, a new graphene nanoribbon crossbar (xGNR) device was proposed which exhibits negative differential resistance (NDR). In this paper, a multi-state memory design is presented that can store multiple bits in a single cell enabled by this xGNR device, called Graphene Nanoribbon Tunneling Random Access Memory (GNTRAM). An approach to increase the number of bits per cell is explored alternative to physical scaling to overcome CMOS SRAM limitations. A comprehensive design for quaternary GNTRAM is presented as a baseline, implemented with a heterogeneous integration between graphene and CMOS. Sources of leakage and approaches to mitigate them are investigated. This design is extensively benchmarked against 16nm CMOS SRAMs and 3T DRAM. The proposed quaternary cell shows up to 2.27x density benefit vs. 16nm CMOS SRAMs and 1.8x vs. 3T DRAM. It has comparable read performance and is power-efficient, up to 1.32x during active period and 818x during stand-by against high performance SRAMs. Multi-state GNTRAM has the potential to realize high-density low-power nanoscale embedded memories. Further improvements may be possible by using graphene more extensively, as graphene transistors become available in future.

Item Type: Article
Uncontrolled Keywords: Graphene, Nanoribbon, CMOS
InterNano Taxonomy: Areas of Application > Electronics and Semiconductor Industries
Collections: Nanomanufacturing Research Collection > Nanomanufacturing Nanoscale Science and Engineering Centers > Center for Hierarchical Manufacturing
Related URLs:
Depositing User: Robert Stevens
Date Deposited: 20 Aug 2015 18:34
Last Modified: 20 Aug 2015 18:34
URI: http://eprints.internano.org/id/eprint/2309

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