Low power dual matchline ternary content addressable memory

Content addressable memories (CAMs) are very attractive for high-speed table lookups in modern network systems. This paper presents a low-power dual match line (ML) ternary CAM (TCAM) to address the power consumption issue of CAMs. The highly capacitive ML is divided into two segments to reduce the active capacitance and hence the power. We analyze possible cases of mismatches and demonstrate a significant reduction in power (up to 43%) for a small penalty in search speed (4%).