In-Memory Search With Phase Change Device-Based Ternary Content Addressable Memory

Here, we proposed an in-memory search prototype based on phase change memory (PCM). First, using the PCM, a highly compact (8F
²
) and low-energy (0.3 fJ/bit/search) nonvolatile ternary addressable memory (TCAM) is demonstrated and achieved a
$6.6\times $
energy saving and
$50\times $
cell area saving over the 16T SRAM-TCAM. Thanks to the non-volatility and massive parallelism of the PCM TCAM to computing Hamming distance, the frequent memory access is alleviated, enabling search operation in situ. The prototype shows a high throughput of 256 GB/s in data deduplication application, obtaining more than
$250\times $
energy saving and
$42\times $
improvement in throughput over CPU. Our study provides a low-area-overhead, low-energy, and high-throughput solution for the storage system to perform search in situ.