Low leakage mask vertical control TCAM for network router

Ternary content addressable memory (TCAM) is generally used in the network router since it can perform the parallel IP lookup. However, the power consumption of traditional router is considerable. Particularly, the leakage power will increase as the technology feature size shrinks. In this paper, a TCAM architecture with mask vertical control (MVC) technique is proposed to reduce the leakage power of network router. In the forwarding table, based on the IP stored in order of prefix length, the MVC technique can turn off the unnecessary power supply to reduce the leakage power. The TCAM with the MVC technique was simulated by using the TSMC 90 nm process. Compared with the traditional TCAM architecture, the MVC scheme can achieve about 21% leakage power reduction.