Opto-Electric Analog SRAM Device Based on Commercial LEDs and Photo-Detectors

초록

Static Random Access Memory (SRAM) devices have continued to be one of the most fundamental and important memory technologies today. However, SRAM has limited programmable memory states (1-bit, digital). The mixed-signal processing, analog-SRAM (ASRAM), is one of the promising candidates to overcome the problem which is widely studied for biomedical and complex signal processes. In this study, we report opto-electric ASRAM (OE-ASRAM) structure consisting of two opto-electric inverters as a flip-flop circuit. The opto-electric inverter is made with a photo-sensor and an LED as an analog?to-digital converter (ADC) and a digital-to-analog converter (DAC), respectively. Finally, we achieved an OE-ASRAM circuit which shows two unique memory access methods of mechanical screening and laser lighting and also works as a common operation characteristics of digital-SRAM. We believe that our proposed OE-ASRAM structure can be used as the basic component for mixed signal processors that can store the data for both analog (photo) and digital (electric) information.