A Non-Volatile Ternary Content-Addressable Memory Cell for Low-Power and Variation-Toleration Operation

A magnetic tunneling junction (MTJ)-based ternary content-addressable memory (TCAM) cell is proposed which consists of 12 transistors and two MTJs. The proposed TCAM cell does not have static power consumption during search operation and therefore ensures highly energy efficient operation. For search operation, the resistance of an MTJ in the anti-parallel state is compared with that of an MTJ in the parallel state and therefore the proposed TCAM cell shows excellent tolerance to the variations of device characteristics. The performance of the proposed TCAM cell is evaluated by simulation and compared with previously reported MTJ-based TCAM cells. The proposed TCAM cells show smaller failure rate of search operation under the same operating condition and device variations.