A noise-tolerant matchline scheme with XOR-based conditional keeper for energy-efficient TCAM

Abstract

A novel AND-type match-line scheme with XOR-based conditional keeper for ternary content-addressable memory (TCAM) are presented in this paper. The XOR-based conditional keeper is turned off at some critical moments to reduce the search time and power consumption. High fan-in AND-type match-line schemes are used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the XOR-based conditional keeper in the presence of noise sources. 37.8% search time reduction and 15.6% power saving are achieved by using the proposed TCAM architecture. Based on TSMC 0.13 mu m CMOS technology at 1.2V supply voltage, a 256 words x 128 bits ternary CAM is designed. The simulation results show that the search time of proposed TCAM architecture is 1.17ns and energy metric of proposed TCAM architecture is 0.7520/search.