A low-power TCAM design using mask-aware match-line (MAML) technique

Authors:
Yen-Jen Chang;Tung-Chi Wu
Affiliations:
National Chung-Hsing University, Taichung, Taiwan Roc;National Chung-Hsing University, Taichung, Taiwan Roc
Venue:
Proceedings of the 21st edition of the great lakes symposium on Great lakes symposium on VLSI
Year:
2011

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Abstract

The ternary content addressable memory (TCAM) is widely used in the network router to speed up the forwarding table lookup, but it usually consumes a large amount of power. This paper introduces a low-power TCAM design, in which we propose the mask-aware match-line (MAML) technique to reduce the TCAM power dissipated in the match-line (ML) switching activity. Depending on the mask data, the MAML design can prevent the entire ML from being charged/discharged during the search operation, such that the average ML power consumption can be reduced effectively. For a 256´128-bit IPv6 TCAM array, based on TSMC 0.18mm technology the simulation results show that the refined MAML design with the granularity of 32 can achieve 58% ML energy reduction compared to the conventional TCAM design, and the search performance improvement is about 25%.