Common-source-line array: An area efficient memory architecture for bipolar nonvolatile devices

Traditional array organization of bipolar nonvolatile memories such as STT-MRAM and memristor utilizes two bitlines for cell manipulations.With technology scaling, such bitline pair will soon become the bottleneck for further density improvement. In this article we propose a novel common-source-line array architecture, which uses a shared source-line along the row, leaving only one bitline per column. We elaborate the array design to ensure reliability, and demonstrate its effectiveness on STT-MRAM and memristor memory arrays. Our study results show that with comparable latency and energy, the proposed common-source-line array can save 34% and 33% area for Memristor-RAM and STT-MRAM respectively, compared with corresponding dual-bitline arrays. © 2013 ACM.