Synthesis and design of parameter extractors for low-power pre-computation-based content-addressable memory using gate-block selection algorithm

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 fast search time, it also significantly increases power consumption. In this paper, we propose a gate- block selection algorithm, which can synthesize a proper parameter extractor of the pre-computation-based CAM (PB-CAM) to improve the efficiency for specific applications such as embedded systems. Through experimental results, we found that our approach effectively reduces the number of comparison operations for specific data types (ranging from 19.24% to 27.42%) compared with the 1's count approach. We used Synopsys Nanosim to estimate the power consumption in TSMC 0.35 um CMOS process. Compared to the 1's count PB-CAM, our proposed PB-CAM achieves 17.72% to 21.09% in power reduction for specific data types.