A review of energy efficient ternary content addressable memory (TCAM) circuits for network application

Abstract

Ternary content addressable memory [TCAMs) are especially popular in network routers for packet forwarding and classification, but they are also beneficial in a variety of other applications that require high speed table lookup. They are used to implement lookup-table function in a single clock cycle using dedicated comparison circuitry. Although it has many attractive features, higher power consumption is very crucial drawbacks of TCAMs. Hence, a great amount of efforts have to give to design T-CAMs without doing any compromise with its speed and voltage margin. Match line sense amplifiers (MLSAs) consume a significant portion of the TCAM power for match detection .This works compares circuit techniques for reducing TCAM power consumption