Spin-Torque Memristor based Offset Cancellation Technique for Sense Amplifiers

Abstract

Unpredictable threshold voltage changes of CMOS transistors cause input referred random offset (IRRO) in sense amplifiers. With the shrinkage of transistors in nano regime, it is being quite costly to cancel the offsets using conventional CMOS based techniques. Motivated by this fact, this study focuses on the IRRO cancellation with the aid of the spintorque memristor technology. Spin-torque memristors in series, compared to parallel, show less resistance and process variations. The resistance value of a spin-torque memristor is regarded as frozen when the current flow over the spin-torque memristor is lower than its critical switching current value. In fact, the proposed structure employs a non-destructive sensing scheme in order to achieve a relatively large sense margin by reducing the IRRO. Our main idea is to reduce or eliminate the IRRO by exploiting the spin-torque memristors for providing the current matching on the input transistors of the voltage comparator. In particular, the overwrite problem of the spin-torque memristor is solved by setting the critical switching current of the spin-torque memristor to be greater than a current value corresponding to the maximum IRRO value. We evaluate the IRRO cancellation technique on the proposed comparator or sense amplifier using 45nm predictive CMOS technology. Although sense amplifiers are targeted in this study, our technique can be applied to any analog amplifier suffering from the IRRO.