Energy and area efficient 11-t ternary content addressable memory for high-speed search

Ternary Content Addressable memory (TCAM) is widely used in wireless net, image processing, data compression, etc. where high-speed data search is required. Despite using faster matching algorithms, software search remains much slower than TCAM based hardware searches. In this paper, we propose a high-speed 11 transistors (11-T) TCAM with significant improvement in speed and power compared to the existing 18-T TCAM and 9-T quasi-static TCAM. Results have been verified via Spice simulations performed using UMC 28-nm technology for a 16 \times 16 TCAM array. Results show that the proposed 11-T TCAM is 21% and 10\times faster than its counterpart 9-T and 18-T TCAM respectively. The proposed 11-T TCAM consumes 30% and 1.5 % less energy for a word search operation in a 6 \times 16 array compared to the existing 9-T TCAM and 18-T TCAM respectively.