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by kruador 602 days ago
Indeed - the 'dynamic' comes from 'dynamic logic'. Wikipedia: "It is distinguished from the so-called static logic by exploiting temporary storage of information in stray and gate capacitances." What Dennard realised was that you don't actually need to have a separate capacitor to hold the bit value - the bit value is just held on the stray and gate capacitance of the transistor that switches on when that bit's row and column are selected, causing the stray capacitance to discharge through the output line.

Because of that, the act of reading the bit's value means that the data is destroyed. Therefore one of the jobs of the sense amplifier circuit - which converts the tiny voltage from the bit cell to the external voltage - is to recharge the bit.

But that stray capacitance is so small that it naturally discharges through the high, but not infinite, resistance when the transistor is 'off'. Hence, you have to refresh DRAM, by regularly reading every bit frequently enough that it hasn't discharged before you got to it. Usually you might only need to read every row frequently enough, because there's actually a sense amplifier for each column, reading all the bit values in that row, with the column address strobe just selecting which column bit gets output.