Design and Performance Evaluation of an Associative Memory with Distributed Control

Abstract An associative memory for retrieving words in sorted order (value-ordered retrieval) and for extremum search is presented. The associative memory is based on a simple cellular architecture, with control distributed over each cell instead of centralized in the memory controller. Therefore, each operation has a short delay and the memory is very suitable for VLSI implementation. In addition to describing the algorithm and hardware design, we evaluate the speed of the memory by analytical and simulation methods with two performance measures: (1) the time required to retrieve all responders (value-ordered retrieval) and (2) the time required to retrieve only the largest responder (extremum search). We demonstrate that the speed is better in both cases than in the fastest methods described in the literature.