Power considerations in banked CAMs: A leakage reduction approach

Abstract

The content-based access of CAMs makes them of great interest in lookup-based operations. However, the large amounts of parallel comparisons required cause an expensive cost in power dissipation. In this work, we present a novel banked precomputation-based architecture for low-power and storage-demanding applications where the reduction of both dynamic and leakage power consumption is addressed. Experimental results show that the proposed banked architecture reduces up to an 89 of dynamic power consumption during the search process while the leakage power consumption is also minimized up to a 91.