A self-disable sense technique with differential NAND cell for content-addressable memories

A self-disable sensing technique for content-addressable memories (CAM) is presented in this work. The proposed differential match-line sense amplifier can be self disabled to choke the charge current fed into the match line right after the comparison result is generated. Instead of using typical NOR/NAND CAM cells with the single ended match-line, a novel NAND CAM cell with the differential match-line can increase the speed of comparison without sacrificing the power consumption. Besides, the 13-T CAM cell provides the complete write, read, and comparison functions to refresh the database and verify its correctness before searching. The CAM with the proposed technique is realized to justify the performance by using a 0.13 µm CMOS process. The average energy consumption of the searching process is 1.584 fj/bit/search.