Low-Voltage Operation of a High-Resistivity Load SOI SRAM Cell by Reduced Back-Gate-Bias Effect

Yasuo YAMAGUCHI  Jun TAKAHASHI  Takehisa YAMAGUCHI  Tomohisa WADA  Toshiaki IWAMATSU  Hans-Oliver JOACHIM  Yasuo INOUE  Tadashi NISHIMURA  Natsuro TSUBOUCHI  

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Electronics   Vol.E78-C   No.7   pp.812-817
Publication Date: 1995/07/25
Online ISSN: 
DOI: 
Print ISSN: 0916-8516
Type of Manuscript: Special Section PAPER (Special Issue on LSI Memory Device, Circuit, Architecture and Application Technologies for Multimedia Age)
Category: 
Keyword: 
SOI,  SIMOX,  SRAM,  low-voltage operation,  back-gate bias effect,  

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Summary: 
The stability of a high-resistivity load SRAM cell using thin-film SOI MOSFET's was investigated as compared with bulk-Si MOSFET's. In SOI MOSFET's back-gate-bias effect was suppressed by indirect application of back-gate-bias to the channel region through the thick buried oxide. The Vt shifts were reduced to be 10% and 14% of that in bulk-Si MOSFET's in partially and fully depleted devices, respectively. The reduction of back-gate-bias effect provides improvement of "high" output voltage and gain in the enhancement-enhancement (EE) inverter in a high-resistivity load SRAM cell, thereby offering improved cell stability. It was demonstrated by using partially depleted SOI SRAM cells that non-destructive reading was obtained even at a low drain voltage of 1.4 V without gate-potential boost, which was much smaller than the operation limit in a bulk Si SRAM with the same patterns and dimensions used as a reference. This implies that SOI devices can also offer low-voltage operation even in TFT-load cells used in up-to-date high-density SRAM's. These results suggest that thin-film SOI MOSFET's have a superior potential of low-voltage operation expected for further scaled devices and/or for portable systems in a forthcoming multimedia era.