A high-performance and energy-efficient TCAM design for IP-address lookup

  • Authors:
  • Yen-Jen Chang

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Computer Science and Engineering, National Chung Hsing University, Taichung, Taiwan

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems II: Express Briefs
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

In this brief, we propose a two-level don't-care gating (DCG) scheme that aims to reduce the ternary content-addressable memory (TCAM) power dissipated in the search-line switching activity. By exploiting the vertically continuous "don't-care" feature, the two-level DCG scheme can largely reduce the average search-line power consumption during a switch pattern. In addition, we also use the search enable technique to eliminate the unnecessary search-line switching activity in the quiet pattern. By reducing both the search-line switching activity and average switching power, the proposed design can minimize the TCAM search-line power consumption. For a 128 × 32 TCAM, the best configuration We examined shows that when the first-level and second-level gating granularities are 16 and 8, respectively, with a 9% search performance improvement, the two-level DCG scheme can achieve 70% search-line energy reduction.