A low power charge-recycling ROM architecture

A new low power charge recycling ROM (CR-ROM) architecture is proposed. The CR-ROM uses charge-recycling method in bit lines of ROM to save the power consumption. About 90% of the total power used in the ROM is consumed in bit lines. With the proposed method, power consumption in ROM bit lines can be reduced asymptotically to zero if the number of bit lines is infinite and the sense amplifiers detect infinitely small voltage difference. However, the real sense amplifiers cannot sense very small voltage difference. Therefore, reduction of power consumption is limited. The simulation results show that the CR-ROM only consumes 13%~78% of the conventional low power contact programming mask ROM