Energy reduction from using selective precharge in two different logic arrays

Selective precharge is a low-power circuit technique that can significantly reduce the average energy use in large fan-in logic arrays. In this paper, we investigate application of this technique to two specific real examples; a content addressable memory (CAM) used in a routing table and a programmable logic array (PLA) used for table-lookup function evaluation. We show that significant energy savings is possible, and we discuss the impact of various array characteristics.