A Low Active Leakage and High Reliability Phase Change Memory (PCM) Based Non-Volatile FPGA Storage Element

The high leakage current has been one of the critical issues in SRAM-based Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). In recent works, resistive non-volatile memories (NVMs) have been utilized to tackle the issue with their superior energy efficiency and fast power-on speed. Phase Change Memory (PCM) is one of the most promising resistive NVMs with the advantages of low cost, high density and high resistance ratio. However, most of the reported PCM-based FPGAs have significant active leakage power and reliability issues. This paper presents a low active leakage power and high reliability PCM based non-volatile SRAM (nvSRAM). The low active leakage power and high reliability are achieved by biasing PCM cells at 0 V during FPGA operation. Compared to the state-of-the-art, the proposed nvSRAM based 4-input look up table (LUT) achieves 174 times reduction in active leakage power and 15000 times increase in retention time. In addition, the proposed nvSRAM-based FPGA system significantly accelerates the loading speed to less than 1 ns with 2.54 fJ/cell loading energy.