A Low-Power Register File with Dual-Vt Dynamic Bit-Lines driven by CMOS Bootstrapped Circuit

Recent CMOS technology scaling has seriously eroded the bit-line noise immunity of register files due to the consequent increase in active bit-line leakage currents. To restore its noise immunity while maintaining performance, we propose and evaluate a $256{\times}40$-bit register file incorporating dual-$V_t$ bit-lines with a boosted gate overdrive voltage in 65 nm bulk CMOS technology. Simulation results show that the proposed bootsrapping scheme lowers leakage current by a factor of 450 without its performance penalty.