A novel ultra-low-power CNTFET and 45 nm CMOS based ternary SRAM

Abstract

This paper presents a CNTFET based ultra-low-power ternary SRAM design which consumes merely 66 nW of power, achieving 84–98% reduction in power consumption as compared to the other CNTFET ternary SRAM designs reported in the literature. The 6-Transistor (6T) Standard Ternary Inverter (STI) cell or the 3T-STI cell form the basic building block of the conventional SRAM cells. These conventional STI designs have an undesirable direct path between VDD and ground during certain ternary input signals, resulting in higher power consumption. In this paper, a highly power-efficient 4T-STI based Ternary SRAM design is presented, which prevents a direct path between the power supply VDD and ground in all the possible ternary logic states.

While CNTFET is preferred by many researchers around the world for low-power VLSI applications, CMOS technology is still widely used in the industry because of the availability of advanced CMOS manufacturing units. Therefore, the proposed ultra-low-power ternary SRAM design has been implemented with both 32 nm CNTFET and 45 nm CMOS devices. The performance of both the CNTFET and CMOS based ultra-low-power ternary SRAM circuits have been benchmarked with corresponding conventional SRAM circuits. The overall decrease in Power Delay Product (PDP) is 86–97% in the proposed ultra-low-power ternary 32 nm CNTFET SRAM circuit and 87–99% in the proposed 45 nm CMOS SRAM with respect to corresponding conventional ternary SRAM circuits.