Abstract
Embedded-DRAMs are widely used in many electronic products due to its more cost-effective than SRAM and its faster read/write random access than FLASH. However, increasingly large power consumption is a big problem in SOC system. For this reason, low power design issue should be taken into consideration. For embedded-DRAM, the stored data should be confirmed to retain in cell array with conventional period in self-refresh mode. But at room temperature, the cell data retention time will extend much longer than that in higher temperature condition. Thus, there is an additional AC component of data retention power at room temperature with conventional period. To solve this problem, we propose a temperature-aware self-refresh control scheme to extend self-refresh period in lower temperature condition. By using discrete-time dynamic tracking to detect replica cell array, conventional self-refresh period can be extended by power function of two with various temperatures. We apply our design in 65nm EDRAM low leakage process within an 8Mb eDRAM macro. The experiment results show that, 95.92% reduction of AC component of data retention power can achieve at room temperature.