A Novel Complementary Ferroelectric FET based Compressed Multibit Content Addressable Memory with High Area- and Energy-Efficiency

In this work, for the first time, a novel complementary ferroelectric FET (FeFET) based multibit content addressable memory (MCAM) with entry compression capability (compressed MCAM), is proposed and experimentally demonstrated for both exact matching and wildcard matching of multibit entries. By utilizing the contrary monotonicity of n-type FeFET and p-type FeFET with independently modulated ferroelectric polarization states, multiple consecutive entries can be compressed in one MCAM cell with only single search signal for the comparison operation. Based on the proposed compressed MCAM, the Internet Protocol (IP) address lookup is demonstrated with higher entry compression efficiency and $10 \times / 4 \times$ reduction in search energy compared with conventional SRAM-/FeFET-based CAM, indicating its great potential for network routing.