Circuit reliability analysis under variations in nanoscale CMOS

Spin Transfer Torque (STT) switching realized using a Magnetic Tunnel Junction (MTJ) device has shown great potential for low power and non-volatile storage. A prime application of MTJs is in building non-volatile Look Up Tables (LUT) used in reconfigurable logic. Such LUTs use a hybrid integration of CMOS transistors and MTJ devices. This thesis discusses the reliability of STT based LUTs under transistor and MTJ variations in nano-scale. The sources of process variations include both the CMOS device related variations and the MTJ variations. A key part of the STT based LUTs is the sense amplifier needed for reading out the MTJ state. This thesis compares the voltage and current based sensing schemes in terms of the power, performance, and reliability metrics