Aging mitigation in memory arrays using self-controlled bit-flipping technique

With CMOS technology downscaling into the nanometer regime, the reliability of SRAM memories is threatened by accelerated transistor aging mechanisms such as Bias Temperature Instability (BTI). BTI leads to a considerable degradation of SRAM cell Static Noise Margin (SNM), which increases the memory failure rate. Since BTI is workload dependent, the aging rates of different cells in a memory array are quite non-uniform. To address this issue, a variety of bit-flipping techniques has been proposed to decrease the SNM degradation by balancing the signal probabilities of the cells. However, existing bit-flipping techniques impose too much area and power overhead as at least an additional column is required to store the inversion flags. In this paper, we propose a low cost self-controlled bit-flipping technique which inverts all bit positions with respect to an existing bit. This technique is applied to a register-file and cache units of an embedded microprocessor. Our simulation results show that the reliability of the proposed technique is similar to that of existing bit-flipping techniques, while imposing 64% less area overhead.