An expermental 16Mb DRAM with reduced peak-current noise

In high-density DRAM'S, a large peak current of typically 200-300mA occurs when sense amplifiers start latching in a conventional scheme (Figure la), resulting in intolerable power bus noise. Four-phase drive for PMOS restoring was reported to reduce the peak current by triggering four pull-up transistors successively.[l] The initial sensing operation by NMOS latches, however, is more critical to signal margin and sensing speed