Pareto points in SRAM design using the sleepy stack approach

Leakage power consumption of current CMOS technology is already a great challenge. ITRS projects that leakage power consumption may come to dominate total chip power consumption as the technology feature size shrinks. Leakage is a serious problem particularly for SRAM which occupies large transistor count in most state-of-the-art chip designs. We propose a novel ultra-low leakage SRAM design which we call "sleepy stack SRAM." Unlike the straightforward sleep approach, sleepy stack SRAM can retain logic state during sleep mode, which is crucial for a memory element. Compared to the best alternative we could find, a 6-T SRAM cell with high-Vth transistors, the sleepy stack SRAM cell with 2xVth at 110 degrees C achieves, using 0.07 mu technology models, more than 2.77X leakage power reduction at a cost of 16% delay increase and 113% area increase. Alternatively, by widening wordline transistors and transistors in the pull-down network, the sleepy stack SRAM cell can achieve 2.26X leakage reduction without increasing delay at a cost of a 125% area penalty.