Low Power Pre-Comparison Scheme for NOR-Type 10T Content Addressable Memory (original) (raw)

LOW POWER CONTENT ADDRESSABLE MEMORY WITH PRE- COMPARISON SCEHEME AND DUAL-VDD TECHMIQUE

A low power content addressable memory is designed by the pre-comparison scheme, power gating and dual-VED techniques. With the pre-comparison scheme, it will reduce the discharging time and power consumption when the match line is mismatch. Furthermore, the techniques of power gating and dual VDD are applied to the pre-comparison CAM to reduce the leakage power. The size of the CAM array is about 32 words, and each word has 32bits. The proposed pre-comparison NORtype 10T CAM can achieve 22.8% dynamic power reduction for the 4bits pre-comparison circuit and 33.4% leakage power reduction with power gating and dual VDD techniques. All the simulation results are based on TSMC 100 nm CMOS technology and the clock frequency is 500MHz.

Precharge-Free, Low-Power Content-Addressable Memory

— Content-addressable memory (CAM) is the hardware for parallel lookup/search. The parallel search scheme promises a high-speed search operation but at the cost of high power consumption. Parallel NOR-and NAND-type matchline (ML) CAMs are suitable for high-search-speed and low-power-consumption applications, respectively. The NOR-type ML CAM requires high power, and therefore, the reduction of its power consumption is the subject of many reported designs. Here, we report and explore the short-circuit (SC) current during the precharge phase of the NOR-type ML. Also proposed here is a novel precharge-free CAM. The proposed CAM is free of the drawbacks of the charge sharing in the NAND and the SC current in the NOR-type CAM. Postlayout simulations performed with a 45-nm technology node revealed a significant reduction in the energy metric: 93% and 77% lesser than NOR-and NAND-type CAMs, respectively. The Monte Carlo simulation for 500 runs was performed to ensure the robustness of the proposed precharge-free CAM. Index Terms— Content-addressable memory (CAM), high-speed search, low power, NAND-type matchline (ML), NOR-type ML, precharge free, short-circuit (SC) current.

Match-Line Division and Control to Reduce Power Dissipation in Content Addressable Memory

IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics, 2018

Hardware search engines are widely used in network routers for high-speed look up and parallel data processing. Content addressable memory (CAM) is such an engine that performs high-speed search at the expense of large energy dissipation. Match-line (ML) power dissipation is one of the critical concerns in designing low-power CAM architectures. NOR-MLs make this issue more severe due to the higher number of shortcircuit discharge paths during search. In this paper, a ML control scheme is presented that enables dynamic evaluation of a match-line by effectively activating or deactivating ML sections to improve the energy efficiency. 128×32-bit memory arrays have been designed using 45-nm CMOS technology and verified at different process-voltage-temperature (PVT) and frequency variations to test the improvements of performance. A search frequency of 100 MHz under 1 V supply, at 27 • C applied on the proposed CAM results 48.25%, 52.55% and 54.80% reduction in energy per search (EpS) compared to a conventional CAM, an early predict and terminate ML precharge CAM (EPTP-CAM) and a ML selective charging scheme CAM (MSCS-CAM) respectively. ML partition also minimizes precharge activities between subsequent searches to reduce total precharge power in the proposed scheme. An approximate reduction of 2.5 times from conventional and EPTP schemes is observed in the precharge dissipation. Besides low search power, proposed design improves the energy-delay by 42% to 88% from compared designs.

Design of Low Power NAND-NOR Content Addressable Memory (CAM) Using SRAM

Content addressable memory (CAM) is a type of computer memory used in high speed searching applications. A content addressable memory (CAM) compares input data to the existing stored data in memory and returns the address of the matching data. A CAM usually contains SRAM cell with a comparison circuitry that enables search operations to complete in single clock cycle. In case of advanced applications we need large sized CAM which leads in more power consumption. In order to reduce the power consumed by the CAM cell, the memory circuits used are 6T SRAM and single bit line SRAM as the core storage element. Single bit line SRAM consumes 46.3 percent of power lesser than 6T SRAM. This paper discusses the implementation of two different architectures of CAM cells namely NAND and NOR type. Power consumption of both architectures are analysed and an efficient NAND-NOR type CAM cell is implemented to overcome its limitations.

A Survey on Different Techniques and Approaches for Low Power Content-Addressable Memory Architectures

2018

This paper presents a survey on current trends adapted in the low power content addressable memory (CAM) architectures. CAMs are modified for the requirement of high speed, low power table look up function and are especially popular in network routers. CAM is a special type of memory with comparison circuitry. It stores or searches the look up table data with the help of one clock cycle. Large amount of power is consuming during comparison process because of parallel circuitry. CAM architectures are designed to reduce the power by eliminating the number of comparisons. In this paper at architectural level we survey different architectures for reducing dynamic power in CAM design. We reviewed seven different methods at the architectural level for low power.

Content-addressable memory (CAM) circuits and architectures: A tutorial and survey

Solid-State Circuits, IEEE …, 2006

We survey recent developments in the design of large-capacity content-addressable memory (CAM). A CAM is a memory that implements the lookup-table function in a single clock cycle using dedicated comparison circuitry. CAMs are especially popular in network routers for packet forwarding and packet classification, but they are also beneficial in a variety of other applications that require high-speed table lookup. The main CAM-design challenge is to reduce power consumption associated with the large amount of parallel active circuitry, without sacrificing speed or memory density. In this paper, we review CAM-design techniques at the circuit level and at the architectural level. At the circuit level, we review low-power matchline sensing techniques and searchline driving approaches. At the architectural level we review three methods for reducing power consumption.

AN ANALYSIS OF ALGORITHM AND ARCHITECTURE FOR LOW-POWER CONTENT ADDRESSABLE MEMORY

We propose extended versions are presented that elaborates the effect of the design’s degrees of freedom, and the effect on non uniformity of input patterns on energy consumption and the performance. The proposed architecture is based on a recently refined sparse clustered networks using binary connections that on-average eliminates most of the parallel comparisons performed during a search. Given an input tag, the proposed architecture computes a few possibilities for the location of the matched tag and performs the comparisons on them to locate a single valid match, and also by using a reordered overlapped search mechanism, most mismatches can be found by searching a few bits of a search word. Following a selection of design parameters, such as the number of CAM entries, the energy consumption and the search delay of the proposed design are 8%, and 26% of that of the conventional NAND architecture, respectively, with a 10% area overhead. Keywords: Associative memory, content-addressable memory (CAM), lowpower computing, recurrent neural networks, binary connections.

IJERT-Design of High Speed Low Power Content Addressable Memory

International Journal of Engineering Research and Technology (IJERT), 2013

https://www.ijert.org/design-of-high-speed-low-power-content-addressable-memory https://www.ijert.org/research/design-of-high-speed-low-power-content-addressable-memory-IJERTV2IS110028.pdf Content-addressable memory (CAM) is frequently used in applications, such as lookup tables,databases, associative computing, and networking, that require high-speed searches due to its ability to improve application performance by using parallel comparison to reduce search time. Although the use of parallel comparison results in reduced search time, it also significantly increases power consumption. In this paper, we propose a Gate-block algorithm approach to improve the efficiency of low power pre computation-based CAM (PBCAM) that leads to 40% sensing delay reduction at a cost of less than 1% area and power overhead. Furthermore, we propose an effective gated-power technique to reduce the peak and average power consumption and enhance the robustness of the design against process variations. A feedback loop is employed to auto-turn off the power supply to the comparison elements and hence reduce the average power consumption by 64%. The proposed design can work at a supply voltage down to 0.5 V.

Content Addressable Memory with Efficient Power Consumption and Throughput

Abstract: Content-addressable memory (CAM) is a hardware table that can search and Store data.CAM is actually considerable Power Consumption and parallel comparison feature where a large amount of transistor are active on each lookup. Thus, robust speed and low-power sense amplifiers are highly sought-after in CAM designs. In this paper, we introduce a modified parity bit matching that leads to delay reduction and power overhead. The modified design minimizes the searching time by matching the store bit from most significant bit instead of matching all the data's present in the row. Furthermore, we propose an effective gated power techniques to decrease the peak and average power consumption and enhance robustness of the design against the process variation. Indexterms-CAM,ParityCAM,ATMController,VPI/VCI

Selective Match-Line Energizer Content Addressable Memory(SMLE -CAM)

A Content Addressable Memory (CAM) is a memory primarily designed for high speed search operation. Parallel search scheme forms the basis of CAM, thus power reduction is the challenge associated with a large amount of parallel active circuits. We are presenting a novel algorithm and architecture described as Selective Match-Line Energizer Content Addressable Memory (SMLE-CAM) which energizes only those MLs (Match-Line) whose first three bits are conditionally matched with corresponding first three search bit using special architecture which comprises of novel XNOR-CAM cell and novel XOR-CAM cell. The rest of the CAM chain is followed by NOR-CAM cell. The 256 X 144 bit SMLE-CAM is implemented in TSMC 90 nm technology and its robustness across PVT variation is verified. The post-layout simulation result shows, it has energy metric of 0.115 fJ/bit/search with search time 361.6 ps, the best reported so far. The maximum operating frequency is 1GHz.