Widely Tunable Adaptive Resolution-controlled Read-sensing Reference Current Generation for Reliable PRAM Data Read at Scaled Technologies

Phase-change random access memory (PRAM) has been emerged as a potential memory due to its excellent scalability, non-volatility, and random accessibility. But, as the cell current is reducing due to cell size scaling, the read-sensing window margin is also decreasing due to increased variation of cell performance distribution, resulting in a substantial loss of yield. To cope with this problem, a novel adaptive read-sensing reference current generation scheme is proposed, whose trimming range and resolution are adaptively controlled depending on process conditions. Performance evaluation in a 58-nm CMOS process indicated that the proposed read-sensing reference current scheme allowed the integral nonlinearity (INL) to be improved from 10.3 LSB to 2.14 LSB (79% reduction), and the differential nonlinearity (DNL) from 2.29 LSB to 0.94 LSB (59% reduction).