Adaptive SRAM memory for low power and high yield

SRAMs typically represent half of the area and more than half of the transistors on a chip today. Variability increases as feature size decreases, and the impact of variability is especially pronounced on SRAMs since they make extensive use of minimum sized devices. Variability leads to a large amount of guard banding in the design phase in order to meet frequency and yield targets. We develop an SRAM architecture that eliminates guard banding. Specifically, our SRAM uses multiple supply voltages that are assigned post-manufacturing. We compensate for variation by powering up manufactured devices that are slower than designed. Specifically, we assign supply voltages to 6T cells on a per-column basis; this gives us sufficiently fine-grained control over devices without excessive area overhead. We show that post-manufacturing voltage assignment results in a 28% reduction in bitline energy compared to a fixed voltage design for the same yield using data from a real-world 45 nm process.