Low-Capacitance and Charge-Shared Match Lines for Low-Energy High-Performance TCAMs
N. Mohan, Manoj Sachdev · IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits · 2007
Emerging high-speed lookup-intensive applications are demanding ternary content addressable memories (TCAMs) with large word-sizes, which suffer from lower search speeds due to larger match line capacitance. Therefore, low-energy high-performance design techniques are needed, which improve the search speeds of TCAMs without increasing their power consumption. In this paper, we present a cell-level comparison logic and a charge-shared match line scheme. Both schemes reduce search time and energy in TCAMs. Measurement results of the above schemes, implemented in 0.18-mum CMOS technology, show a search time reduction of 42% and 11%, and a search-energy reduction of 25% and 9%, respectively.