This is my second year in CRA-W's DREU program. Last summer, I was fortunate enough to be paired with Dr. Hyesoon Kim at Georgia Tech. While there, I was exposed to the field of computer architecture, which has now become my area of research interest.

Now this summer, I will continue researching in computer architecture at Brown University under the supervision of Professor Bahar.

My project for the summer focuses on reducing the aging effects of Negative Bias Temperature Instability, or NBTI, on 6T SRAM cells. Previous approaches include power gating and very general reliability-aware circuit designs.

Our approach at reducing NBTI aging effects is similar to the periodic cell flipping approach mentione in the link above on reliability-aware designs. The most damage occurs when an SRAM cell contains the logical value of '0', which occurs more commonly than storing a logical '1.' To mantain aging at a minimum, having an SRAM probability of storing a '1' or a '0' should remain at 50:50. This requires periodic cell flipping, while still keeping track of the true value of the SRAM cell. Over the summer, I shall be working on this project with the help of Prof. Bahar and her graduate student team in LEMS.



To visit my weekly journal, click here.

To load my finished report, click here.