A Low-Power Ternary CAM With Positive-Feedback Match-Line Sense Amplifiers

Ternary content-addressable memories (TCAMs) can perform high-speed and deterministic table lookups. However, its main drawback is high power consumption. A significant portion of the TCAM power is consumed by match-line sense amplifiers (MLSAs) for match detection. This paper presents a 20-kilobit TCAM featuring two MLSAs with positive-feedback techniques. The proposed circuits have been fabricated on a test chip in 0.18- mum CMOS technology. Energy measurement results of the two MLSAs show reductions of 56% and 48%, respectively, over the conventional current-race MLSA.