DMTJ-Based Non-Volatile Ternary Content Addressable Memory for Energy-Efficient High-Performance Systems

Abstract

This paper explores performance of non-volatile ternary content addressable memories (NV-TCAMs), exploiting double-barrier magnetic tunnel junction (DMTJ) as comparatively evaluated with respect to the single barrier MTJ (SMTJ)-based solution. The comparison is performed at the circuit-level, considering different memory words. Overall, simulation results show that the DMTJ-based NV-TCAM is a good alternative to replace SMTJ-based NV-TCAM, mainly due to the search operation improvement. In particular, for a 144-bit NV-TCAM word operating at a nominal voltage of 1.1 V, the DMTJ-based solution offers improvements in terms of energy and search error rate of 14% and 66%, respectively, while showing similar search delay as the SMTJ-based NV-TCAM.