A novel match-line selective charging scheme for high-speed, low-power and noise-tolerant content-addressable memory

Content-addressable memory (CAM) is an essential component for high-speed lookup intensive applications. This paper presents a match-line selective charging technique to increase speed and reduce the energy per bit per search while increasing the noise-tolerance. Simulation in TSMC 0.18 μm technology with 64×72 Ternary CAM shows the match-line energy reduction of 45% compared to the conventional current-saving scheme with the reduction of minimum cycle time by 68% and the improvement of noise-tolerance by 96%.