Analysis of process variation effects on a CMOS bidirectional associative memory

This paper discusses the results of an analysis on the effects of process variation for a CMOS BAM; the most significant factors being transistor parameter variation in threshold voltage (V_TO), and conduction factor (K´). Monte-Carlo simulation has been carried out for a range of process deviations and for different sizes of BAM. This has enabled bounds to be established, for a specified size of BAM, on the process parameter deviation allowable for correct recall. It is shown that the BAM recall failure rate is pattern dependent, and pattern pairs with the maximum or close to maximum hamming distance between them have significantly lower pattern recall failure rates compared to randomly selected pattern pairs