Seung-Wook Kwack

A Low Power High Performance Register-Controlled Digital DLL for 2Gbps x32 GDDR SDRAM

A new low power high performance register-controlled digital delay locked loop (LPRCDLL) is presented. The circuit has fine delay compensation ability, fast delay compensation according to external voltage variation, and inherent duty correction. The digital DLL used for 2Gbps 8M times 32 GDDR3 SDRAM is fabricated using a 0.10mum technology. Experimental results show less than plusmn1% duty correction from external duty error of plusmn5%, less than 400 cycle locking time, 1GHz operation frequency at 1.5V, 38mW at 1.5V/1GHz, and a wide locking range from 250MHz to 1GHz

A 1.6V 3.3Gb/s GDDR3 DRAM with dual-mode phase- and delay-locked loop using power-noise management with unregulated power supply in 54nm CMOS

As the speed of DRAM increases and the applications spread, DLLs for DRAM require low-jitter characteristics as well as wide operating range in frequency and voltage domains. Even though digital DLLs have improved jitter control schemes [1,2,4], it is difficult to reject the jitter of the external clock in real applications. Whether a PLL or DLL is used, it should have negative delay for phase compensation in DRAM [3]. We design PDLL that has a PLL and a DLL with different roles. The DLL, which is used for phase compensation, is digital with low power consumption. The PLL, which is used for jitter reduction, is a charge-pump type [5] with dual KVCO and self-mode-shifting scheme, using an unregulated power supply for flexibility in operating range. Powering the PLL with an unregulated power supply is made possible by the power-noise-management technique of VPP control and by using a pseudo-rank architecture to suppress VDD noise due to low VPP pumping efficiency.

A Low Power Digital DLL with Wide Locking Range for 3Gbps 512Mb GDDR3 SDRAM

A new low power, low cost and high performance register-controlled digital delay locked loop with wide locking range is presented. The DLL has dual loops with single replica block, duty cycle correction enhance controller (DCCEC), smart power down controller (SPDC) for reducing the standby current during power down, and locking range doubler for wide locking range. The digital DLL used for 3 Gbps 512 Mb GDDR3 SDRAM is fabricated using an 80 nm DRAM Process. Experimental results show less than plusmn1% duty correction from external duty error of plusmn5%, less than 400 cycle locking time, 1.5 GHz operation frequency at 1.9 V, and a wide locking range from 50 MHz to 1.5 GHz.

25.3 A 1.35V 5.0Gb/s/pin GDDR5M with 5.4mW standby power and an error-adaptive duty-cycle corrector

The demand for high-bandwidth memories is increasing with an increase in the need for high-performance systems. Wide-I/O memory and GDDR5 are two types of high-bandwidth memories. GDDR5 is more compatible than wide I/O for contemporary systems, such as graphics cards and game consoles. The datarate of GDDR5 has reached 7Gb/s/pin. However, the power consumption and cost have increased owing to high-performance-oriented designs, die penalties, and additional test costs. DDR4 is an alternative low-cost memory with high performance in the range of 2.4 to 3.2Gb/s/pin [1]. However it is difficult for DDR4 DRAM to raise the 3.2Gb/s/pin bin portion to lower the cost. In DRAMs, the standby power and self-refresh power are more important than the operating power because DRAMs are mainly in the standby or self-refresh mode in systems. As the operating speed increases, the data window is narrowed, and the jitter increases. Therefore, a duty-cycle corrector (DCC) is employed to increase the data window when the external clock duty cycle is distorted in GDDR5 [2]. The bang-bang jitter caused by the DCC is inevitable even if the external clock duty ratio is exactly 50%. Sometimes the DCC may distort the data window because of an internal DCC offset. This paper presents a GDDR5M (mainstream) memory for graphics cards and a small-outline dual-inline memory module (SO-DIMM). The standby power is managed by the auto-sync mode. Additionally, the architecture of GDDR5M is similar to that of DDR4, and not GDDR5. The error-adaptive DCC can remove the initial duty-cycle offset automatically and remove the bang-bang jitter when the duty cycle of the external clock is not distorted.

A high speed graphics DRAM with low power and low noise data bus inversion in 54nm CMOS

This paper presents a high speed 1Gb GDDR3 Graphics DRAM using data bus inversion (DBI) DC mode in order to achieve low power and low noise in DRAM. A DBI, digital majority voter (DMV) circuit and the Global I/O (GIO) control circuit on the DBI DC mode are newly proposed. In this DMV, The current of GIO toggle pattern is consumed less than 47% compared with the analog majority voter (AMV). The voltage fluctuation wave form of the data eye is also reduced in accordance with DBI on the operation mode. Using the proposed DBI scheme can produce almost stable signal integrity of the DQs against high speed operation. The DBI is fabricated using 54nm technology.