IEEE Access (Jan 2023)

A Low-Energy DMTJ-Based Ternary Content- Addressable Memory With Reliable Sub-Nanosecond Search Operation

  • Esteban Garzon,
  • Leonid Yavits,
  • Giovanni Finocchio,
  • Mario Carpentieri,
  • Adam Teman,
  • Marco Lanuzza

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2023.3245981
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 11
pp. 16812 – 16819

Abstract

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In this paper, we propose an energy-efficient, reliable, hybrid, 10-transistor/2-Double-Barrier-Magnetic-Tunnel-Junction (10T2DMTJ) non-volatile (NV) ternary content-addressable memory (TCAM) with sub-nanosecond search operation. Our cell design relies on low-energy-demanding MTJs organized in a low-complexity voltage-divider-based circuit along with a simple dynamic logic CMOS matching network, which improves the search reliability. The proposed NV-TCAM was designed in 28 nm FDSOI process and evaluated under exhaustive Monte Carlo simulations. When compared to the best previous proposed NV-TCAMs, our solution achieves lower search error rate (3.8 $\times $ ) and lower write and search energy (–73% and–79%, respectively), while also exhibiting smaller area footprint (–74%). Such benefits are achieved at the expense of reduced search speed.

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