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

Abstract

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.

Keywords

• Double-barrier MTJ
• non-volatile TCAM (NV-TCAM)
• energy-efficiency
• low-power