A low power and robust carbon nanotube 6T SRAM design with metallic tolerance

Carbon nanotube field-effect transistor (CNTFET) is envisioned as a promising device to overcome the limitations of traditional CMOS based MOSFETs due to its favourable physical properties. This paper presents a novel six-transistor (6T) static random access memory (SRAM) bitcell design using CNTFETs. Extensive validations and comparative analyses are carried out with the proposed SRAM design using SPICE based simulations. We show that the proposed CNTFET based SRAM has a significantly better static noise margin (SNM) and write ability margin (WAM) compared to a CNTFET-based standard 6T bitcell, equivalent to isolated read-port 8T cell based on CNTFET, while consuming less dynamic power. We further demonstrate that it exhibits higher robustness under process, voltage and temperature (PVT) variations when compared with the traditional CMOS SRAM cell designs. Furthermore, metallic CNTs removal technique is used considering metallic tolerance to make the proposed SRAM design more reliable.