Flexible Ferroelectric-Capacitor Element for Low Power and Compact Logic-in-Memory Architectures

The “Von Neumann bottleneck” and large standby power become serious problems in recent deep-sub-micron technology. To solve these problems, this paper presents ferroelectric-based logic circuits called Flexible Ferroelectric-Capacitor (FFC) elements for logic-in-memory architectures. In an FFC element, storage and a logic function are integrated on non-volatile ferro-electric-capacitors to achieve low power and area-efficiency. Moreover, the FFC elements are designed to flexibly change the access transistor network to achieve high functionality and programmability to change the function. In this paper, FFC elements for binary logic and for multiple-valued logic are proposed. The FFC elements are evaluated using HSPICE simulations and compared to the equivalent CMOS circuits. Both of the FFC elements for binary logic and for multiple-valued logic consume no power in the standby state, and reduce the transistor count and the dynamic energy consumption by respectively more than 94% and more than 65%.