A banked precomputation-based CAM architecture for low-power storage-demanding applications

Abstract

The content-based access of CAMs makes them of great interest in look-up based operations. However, the large amounts of parallel comparisons required cause an expensive cost in power dissipation. In this work we present a novel banked pre-computation based architecture for low-power and storage-demanding applications. Experimental results show that the proposed banked architecture reduces up to a 76% of power consumption during the search process and decreases the active area in a 10% while performance is also improved by a 25%