The techniques known in literature for the design of SRAM structures with low standby leakage typically exploit an additional operation mode, named the sleep mode or the standby mode. In this paper, existing low leakage SRAM structures are analyzed by several SPEC2000 benchmarks. As expected, the examined SRAM architectures have static power consumption lower than the conventional 6-T SRAM cell. However, the additional activities performed to enter and to exit the sleep mode also lead to higher dynamic energy. Our study demonstrates that, due to this, the overall energy consumption achieved by the known low-leakage techniques is greater than the conventional approach. In the second part of this paper, a novel low-leakage SRAM cell is presented. The proposed structure establishes when to enter and to exit the sleep mode, on the basis of the data stored in it, without introducing time and energy penalties with respect to the conventional 6-T cell. The new SRAM structure was realized using the UMC 0.18-mum, 1.8-V, and the ST 90-nm 1-V CMOS technologies. Tests performed with a set of SPEC2000 benchmarks have shown that the proposed approach is actually energy efficient