Tomorrows High-Quality SoCs Require High-Quality Embedded Memories Today

Embedded memories increasingly dominate SoC designs -whether chip area, performance, power consumption, manufacturing yield or design time are considered. ITRS data indicate that the embedded memory contents of ICs may increase from 20% in 1999 to 90% at the SOnm node by the end of the decade. Therefore, even more than today, the success of tomorrow's SoC design will depend on the availability of high-quality embedded memories. Advanced process technologies pose new challenges for meeting these quality criteria. Some of the challenges are: providing flexible redundancy solutions for embedded SRAMs; designing competitive memories despite ever increasing leakage currents; reducing SRAM susceptibility to soft-error rate (SER). These challenges are bringing about the need for significant innovations in design of embedded memories, much more so than in recent previous process generations. In the presentation, the challenges will be outlined and solutions will be proposed. The focus of the discussion will be on SRAM/ROM, but other technologies such as eDRAM and "IT SRAM" will also be addressed.