3-D Content Addressable Memory Architectures

  • Authors:
  • Yong-Jyun Hu;Jin-Fu Li;Yu-Jen Huang

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-;-

  • Venue:
  • MTDT '09 Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE International Workshop on Memory Technology, Design, and Testing
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Three-dimensional (3-D) integration is an emerging integrated circuit technology. Semiconductor memory is very suitable to be realized using 3-D technology due to its regularity. Different from random access memories (RAMs), a content addressable memory (CAM) has a priority address encoder (PAE) for evaluating the comparison result. The existing of PAE causes that the design of 3-D architectures for CAMs is more difficult than that for RAMs. This paper proposes a matchlinepartitioned 3-D architecture and a searchline-partitioned 3-D architectures for CAMs. An inter-layer interleaving scheme is proposed to distribute PAE logic circuits evenly in two layers such that the footprint of a 3-D CAM is minimized. Experimental results show that the proposed 3-D CAM have better search performance for most of CAMs used in the industry.