Energy-Efficient And Process-Variation-Resilient Write Circuit Schemes For Spin Hall Effect Mram Device

Keywords

Magnetic random access memory (MRAM); magnetic tunnel junction (MTJ); process variation (PV); spin hall effect (SHE) MRAM; spin-based memory cell; write energy

Abstract

In this paper, various energy-efficient write schemes are proposed for switching operation of spin hall effect (SHE)-based magnetic tunnel junctions (MTJs). A transmission gate (TG)-based write scheme is proposed, which provides a symmetric and energy-efficient switching behavior. We have modeled an SHE-MTJ using precise physics equations, and then leveraged the model in SPICE circuit simulator to verify the functionality of our designs. Simulation results show the TG-based write scheme advantages in terms of device count and switching energy. In particular, it can operate at 12% higher clock frequency while realizing at least 13% reduction in energy consumption compared to the most energy-efficient write circuits. We have analyzed the performance of the implemented write circuits in presence of process variation (PV) in the transistors' threshold voltage and SHE-MTJ dimensions. Results show that the proposed TG-based design is the second most PV-resilient write circuit scheme for SHE-MTJs among the implemented designs. Finally, we have proposed the 1TG-1T-1R SHE-based magnetic random access memory (MRAM) bit cell based on the TG-based write circuit. Comparisons with several of the most energy-efficient and variation-resilient SHE-MRAM cells indicate that 1TG-1T-1R delivers reduced energy consumption with 43.9% and 10.7% energy-delay product improvement, while incurring low area overhead.

Publication Date

9-1-2017

Publication Title

IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems

Volume

25

Issue

9

Number of Pages

2394-2401

Document Type

Article

Personal Identifier

scopus

DOI Link

https://doi.org/10.1109/TVLSI.2017.2699579

Socpus ID

85018883512 (Scopus)

Source API URL

https://api.elsevier.com/content/abstract/scopus_id/85018883512

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