28nm Ultra-Low Power Near-/Sub- threshold First-In-First-Out (FIFO) Memory for Multi-Bio-Signal Sensing Platforms

Abstract

In this paper, an ultra-low-power near-/sub-threshold first-in-firstout (FIFO) memory is proposed for energy-constrained bio-signal sensing applications. This FIFO memory is designed and implemented using folded bit-interleaved 10T near-/sub-threshold SRAM bit-cells, self-timed pointers and bank-level power control circuits. The 10T SRAM cell is proposed for the bit-interleaving structure with 2.4X write static noise margin (SNM) improvement. The folded bit-interleaving structure reduces the bit-line capacitance and avoids long routing wires for the circular self-timed pointers. Additionally, the event-driven self-timed pointers are designed to reduce the power consumption of clock buffers. For further decreasing the overall power dissipation, bank-level column-based power control circuitry is proposed to switch the voltages for different banks to achieve 60.5% power saving. A 512x16 FIFO memory is implemented in UMC 28nm HKMG CMOS technology. Compared with the prior arts, 47X power reduction and 2.7X area efficiency can be achieved by the proposed design techniques.