  Maintaining benefits of CMOS technology scaling is becoming challenging due
to increased manufacturing complexities and unwanted passive power
dissipations. This is particularly challenging in SRAM, where manufacturing
precision and leakage power control are critical issues. To alleviate some of
these challenges a novel non-volatile memory alternative to SRAM was proposed
called nanowire volatile RAM (NWRAM). Due to NWRAMs regular grid based layout
and innovative circuit style, manufacturing complexity is reduced and at the
same time considerable benefits are attained in terms of performance and
leakage power reduction. In this paper, we elaborate more on NWRAM circuit
aspects and manufacturability, and quantify benefits at 16nm technology node
through simulation against state-of-the-art 6T-SRAM and gridded 8T-SRAM
designs. Our results show the 10T-NWRAM to be 2x faster and 35x better in terms
of leakage when compared to high performance gridded 8T-SRAM design.
