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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.

An ultra-low power consumption high-linearity switching scheme for successive approximation register (SAR) analog-to-digital converter (ADC) is presented with a mixed switching method. Based on the combination of C-2C dummy capacitors, the charge sharing technique and monotonic switching method, the proposed switching method achieves high-energy saving and high linearity. Compared with the conventional SAR ADC, the proposed method consumes no reset energy and achieves 98.9% less switching energy and 87.2% reduction in capacitor area. Moreover, the proposed scheme obtains good performance in linearity. Furthermore, the common-mode voltage variation of the proposed scheme is smaller than other published schemes, which is important for decreasing input-dependent offset of the comparator.

The Timepix device is a pixelated silicon detector. Because of its structure, an incoming particle can deposit its energy in several adjacent pixels as a result of the charge sharing effect. The distribution of energy in the pixels activated by a heavy charged particle can be exploited to determine the entering point of the particle with a precision better than the pixel dimensions. This is experimentally illustrated by images of different samples obtained with alpha particles. This work was carried out within the CERN Medipix Collaboration.