A Comprehensive Review of Energy Efficient Content Addressable Memory Circuits for Network Applications
Abstract
Content addressable memory (CAM) can perform high-speed table look-up with bit level masking capability. This feature makes CAMs extremely attractive for high-speed packet forwarding and classification in network routers. High-speed look-up implies all the CAM word entries to be accessed and compared with a search word to find a suitable match in a single clock cycle. This parallel search activity requires large energy consumption which needs to be reduced. In this paper, a review of the energy reduction techniques of CAM is presented. A comparative study of some popular techniques has been made with the help of simulations carried out in this work and published results.
This paper was recommended by Regional Editor Emre Salman.