• 文献标题:   Low-Power Heterogeneous Graphene Nanoribbon-CMOS Multistate Volatile Memory Circuit
  • 文献类型:   Article
  • 作  者:   KHASANVIS S, HABIB KMM, RAHMAN M, LAKE R, MORITZ CA
  • 作者关键词:   design, performance, lowpower design, memory circuit, benchmarking, gntram, graphene nanoribbon, hybrid integrated circuit, multistate memory, negative differential resistance
  • 出版物名称:   ACM JOURNAL ON EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES IN COMPUTING SYSTEMS
  • ISSN:   1550-4832 EI 1550-4840
  • 通讯作者地址:   Univ Massachusetts
  • 被引频次:   0
  • DOI:   10.1145/2700233
  • 出版年:   2015

▎ 摘  要

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 article, a multistate 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 versus 16nm CMOS SRAMs and 1.8x versus 3T DRAM. It has comparable read performance and is power efficient up to 1.32x during active period and 818x during standby against high-performance SRAMs. Multistate 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 the future.