Abstract: A novel cascaded charge-sharing technique is presented in content-addressable memories (CAMs), which not only effectively reduces the match-line (ML) power by using a pre-select circuit, but also realizes a high search speed. Pre-layout simulation results show a 75.9% energy-delay-product (EDP) reduction of the MLs over the tradi-tional precharge-high ML scheme and 41.3% over the segmented ML method. Based on this technique, a test-chip of 64-word×144-bit ternary CAM (TCAM) is implemented using a 0.18-μm 1.8-V CMOS process, achieving an 1.0 ns search delay and 4.81 fJ/bit/search for the MLs.

Key words: content-addressable memory,  energy-delay-product,  cascaded charge-sharing