The 15th IEEE International Conference on Electron Devices and Solid-State Circuits (EDSSC)

355 / 2019-02-22 19:26:37

Energy and Area Efficient 11-T Ternary Content Addressable Memory for High-Speed Search

TCAM, BCAM, Memory, Storage, Hardware Search, SRAM

Plenary track > Digital Circuits

Ternary Content Addressable memory is widely used in wireless networking, image processing, data compression etc where a high-speed data search is required. Despite using faster matching algorithms, software searching remains much slower than TCAM based hardware search. In this paper, we propose a high-speed 11 Transistors (11-T) TCAM with significant improvement in speed and power compared to the existing 18-T TCAM and 9-T quasi-static TCAM. Results are verified via spice simulation performed using UMC 28 nm technology for a 16$\times$16 TCAM array. Results show that the proposed 11-T TCAM is 21\% and 10$\times$ faster than its counterpart 9-T and 18-T TCAM respectively. The proposed ~11-T TCAM consumes 30\% and 1.5 \% less energy for a 16-bit word search operation compared to the 9-T and 18-T TCAM respectively.