학술논문

A Scalable Shield-Bitline-Overdrive Technique for Sub-1.5 V Chain FeRAMs
Document Type
Periodical
Source
IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits IEEE J. Solid-State Circuits Solid-State Circuits, IEEE Journal of. 46(9):2171-2179 Sep, 2011
Subject
Components, Circuits, Devices and Systems
Engineered Materials, Dielectrics and Plasmas
Computing and Processing
Microprocessors
Random access memory
Nonvolatile memory
Ferroelectric films
Capacitors
Arrays
Chain FeRAM
FeRAM
ferroelectric memory
low voltage
signal
Language
ISSN
0018-9200
1558-173X
Abstract
A ferroelectric capacitor overdrive technique with shield-bitline drive has been demonstrated and verified by a 130 nm 576 Kb test chip with a 0.7191 $\mu{\hbox{m}}^{2}$ cell. First, cell signal degradation and bitline-to-bitline coupling noise worsened by wide cell signal distribution in low voltage scaled FeRAMs are discussed. Next, the shield-bitline-overdrive technique is presented. This technique applies a 0.24 V higher bias to the ferroelectric capacitor through bitline-to-bitline coupling during the read operation without increasing device stress, and eliminates bitline-to-bitline coupling noise. The measured tail-to-tail cell signal is improved by 100 mV and effectively doubles for 1.3 V array operation. The area penalty of the proposed scheme is 0.9% of the 576 Kb cell array, and the access time penalty is 5 ns. The effect of this technique will be enhanced by cell shrink as the bitline-to-bitline coupling ratio increases. A tail-to-tail cell signal window of more than 200 mV is expected in 1.3 V 256 Mb and 1.2 V 512 Mb chain FeRAMs, whereas the tail-to-tail cell signal window without overdrive would degrade to 95 mV for 256 Mb and 60 mV for 512 Mb.