Low Cost Ternary Content Addressable Memory Based on Early Termination Precharge Scheme
Kyeongho Lee, Geon Ko, Jongsun Park · 2019
In this paper, we present early termination match-line (ML) precharge scheme for low power and high speed ternary content addressable memory (TCAM). In the proposed TCAM, by employing the pre-decision based early termination, unnecessary ML precharging has been effectively eliminated while improving the search speed and achieving error-free operation. The reference voltage generator used to implement the proposed early termination approach can be simply designed using dummy row without large area overhead. According to the post-layout simulations with the 65nm CMOS process, the proposed early termination ML precharge scheme shows up to 30.4% of sensing delay improvement and 65.9% of ML power savings compared to the conventional approach. It also shows 8% of FOM (energy/bit/search) improvement compared to state-of-the-art works.