Hardware Efficient Transposable 8T SRAM for Orthogonal Data Access

Abstract

This paper presents a novel 8T SRAM bitcell-based transposable (TP) memory supporting both row-wise and column-wise data access. The proposed TP-SRAM enables orthogonal data access with additional diagonal word-lines and a low-complexity addressing scheme. To reduce cell array area overhead, the proposed TP-SRAM adopts a bitcell structure that can share all aspects of layout with adjacent cells like standard 6T-SRAM. We also propose a bidirectional barrel shifter based on dynamic logic gates to minimize the hardware cost required for the TP addressing scheme. In the proposed bidirectional barrel shifter, area and delay are minimized by using two complementary dynamic inverting MUXs that can balance the number of NMOS and PMOS transistors. The proposed 16Kb TP-SRAM implemented in 28nm CMOS technology has 17% reduced power, 52% faster operation delay, and 39% smaller area compared to the state-of-the-art.