Leakage Energy Reduction in Banked Content Addressable Memories

The content-based access of CAMs makes them of great interest in look-up based operations. However, the large amounts of parallel comparisons required cause an expensive cost in power dissipation. In this work we present a novel banked pre-computation based architecture for low-power and storage-demanding applications where the reduction of both dynamic and leakage power consumption is addressed. Experimental results show that the proposed banked architecture reduces up to an 89% of dynamic power consumption during the search process while the leakage power consumption is also minimized by a 90%. The active area is decreased in a 10% while performance is also improved by a 70%.

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