Abstract
Leakage power increase due to technology scaling has attracted a lot of attention to developing nonvolatile memory (NVM) technologies . Among the explored NVM candidates by the community, spintronic-based technologies such as magnetic RAM and spin-transfer torque RAM seem to be very promising. Conventionally, the main challenge of employing MRAMs as a possible candidate in universal memories is high power dissipation and long delay during write operation. However, in recent cutting-edge semiconductor technologies, the issue moves from write to read operation mainly due to significant suppression in read margin. Degradation in the read yield emerges from the increase in process variation and lowering of the supply voltage. Therefore, numerous research activities have been recently conducted to improve the read margin. This chapter reviews the sensing techniques, which have been developed to deal with the read margin degradation of MRAMs in scaled technology nodes. In addition, the chapter provides a background on different writing methods of MRAMs and possible solutions to improve the density of bit-cells.
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Zeinali, B., Moradi, F. (2019). Sensing of Spintronic Memories. In: Ghosh, S. (eds) Sensing of Non-Volatile Memory Demystified. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97347-0_1
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