BTI Analysis for High Performance and Low power SRAM Sense Amplifier Designs

Bias Temperature Instability (BTI) has led to more vulnerable ICs with the continuous downscaling of CMOS technologies. This paper presents the impact of BTI for two different SRAM sense amplifiers which target two applications, i.e., low power (LP), and high performance (HP). The evaluation metrics, the sensing delay (SD) and energy, are analyzed for three workloads. In contrast to earlier work, this paper thoroughly quantifies the increased impact of BTI in such sense amplifiers for the different applications for 45nm technology node. The results show that the sensing delay degrades faster for high performance application. We observed an increase in energy consumption for the HP application when BTI is applied, while this consumption reduces for the LP application. The results further show that the BTI impact sensing delay is 4.00% for LP, and 5.02% for HP when typical workload is applied for a 10s lifetime, while there is no significant change in energy consumption for both LP and HP applications. Furthermore, the results show that, the BTI sensing delay impact is higher for Standard-latch type Sense Amplifier (SLT-SA) than for Double-tail ltach-type Sense Amplifier (DTLT-SA) for the worst case workload. BTI impact on energy is lower for DTLT-SA as compared to SLT-SA.