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.