It is shown that it is feasible to apply 0.5-V 6-T SRAM cells in a 25-nm high-speed 1-Gb e-SRAM. In particular, for coping with rapidly reduced voltage margin as VDD is reduced, a boosted word-voltage scheme is first proposed. Second, Vt variations are reduced with repair techniques and nanoscale FD-MOSFETs to further widen the voltage margin. Third, a worst case design is developed, for the first time, to evaluate the cell. This design features a dynamic margin analysis and takes subthreshold current, temperature, and Vt variations and their combination in the cell into account. Fourth, the proposed scheme is evaluated by applying the worst-case design and a 25-nm planar FD-SOI MOSFET. It is consequently found that the scheme provides a wide margin and high speed even at 0.5 V. A 0.5-V high-speed 25-nm 1-Gb SRAM is thus feasible. Finally, to further improve the scheme, it is shown that it is necessary to use FinFETs and suppress and compensate process, voltage, and temperature variations in a chip and wafer.

A small-sized leakage-controlled gated sense amplifier (SA) and relevant circuits are proposed for 0.5-V multi-gigabit DRAM arrays. The proposed SA consists of a high-VT PMOS amplifier and a low-VT NMOS amplifier which is composed of high-VT NMOSs and a low-VT cross-coupled NMOS, and achieves 46% area reduction compared to a conventional SA with a low-VT CMOS preamplifier. Separation of the proposed SA and a data-line pair achieves a sensing time of 6 ns and a writing time of 0.6 ns. Momentarily overdriving the PMOS amplifier achieves a restoring time of 13 ns. The gate level control of the high-VT NMOSs and the gate level compensation circuit for PVT variations reduce the leakage current of the proposed SA to 2% of that without the control, and its effectiveness was confirmed using a 50-nm test chip.

A gated sense amplifier (GSA) consisting of a low-Vt gated preamplifier (LGA) and a high-Vt sense amplifier (SA) is proposed. The gating scheme of the LGA enables quick amplification of an initial cell signal voltage (vS0) because of its low Vt and prevents the cell signal from degrading due to interference noise between data lines. As for a conventional sense amplifier (CSA), this new type of noise causes sensing error, and the noise-generation mechanism was clarified for the first time by analysis of vS0. The high-Vt SA holds the amplified signal and keeps subthreshold current low. Moreover, the gating scheme of the low-Vt MOSFETs in the LGA drives the I/O line quickly. The GSA thus simultaneously achieves fast sensing, low-leakage data holding, and fast I/O driving, even for sub-1-V mid-point sensing. The GSA is promising for future sub-1-V gigabit dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) because of reduced variations in the threshold voltage of MOSFETs; thus, the offset voltage of the LGA is reduced. The effectiveness of the GSA was verified with a 70-nm 512-Mbit DRAM chip. It demonstrated row access time (tRCD) of 16.4 ns and read access (tAA) of 14.3 ns at array voltage of 0.9 V.

A charge-integration read scheme has been developed for a solid-nanopore DNA-sequencer that determines a genome by direct and electrical measurements of transverse tunneling current in single-stranded DNA. The magnitude of the current was simulated with a first-principles molecular dynamics method. It was found that the magnitude is as small as in the sub-pico ampere range, and signals from four bases represent wide distributions with overlaps between each base. The distribution is believed to originate with translational and rotational motion of DNA in a nanopore with a frequency of over 105 Hz. A sequence scheme is presented to distinguish the distributed signals. The scheme makes widely distributed signals time-integrated convergent by cumulating charge at the capacitance of a nanopore device and read circuits. We estimated that an integration time of 1.4 ms is sufficient to obtain a signal difference of over 10 mV for distinguishing between each DNA base. Moreover, the time is shortened if paired bases, such as A-T and C-G in double-stranded DNA, can be measured simultaneously with two nanopores. Circuit simulations, which included the capacitance of a nanopore calculated with a device simulator, successfully distinguished between DNA bases in less than 2.0 ms. The speed is roughly six orders faster than that of a conventional DNA sequencer. It is possible to determine the human genome in one day if 100-nanopores are operated in parallel.

A fast-motion-estimation (ME) algorithm called a "breaking-off-search (BOS)" was developed. It can improve processing speed of the full-search (FS) method by a factor of 3.4. The BOS algorithm can not only sometimes achieve better visual quality than FS, but can also solve visual degradation problems associated with conventional fast-ME algorithms whenever picture patterns change (i. e. , presence of scene changes). The power dissipation of a 0.6-µ m CMOS parallel Wallace-tree motion estimator using BOS was reduced to about 281 mW which was 1/28.7 that of the 0.6-µ m CMOS binary-tree motion estimator using FS.