A Voltage Swing Self-Adjustable Match-Line Sensing Scheme for Content-Addressable Memories

A Voltage Swing Self-Adjustable (VSSA) Match-Line (ML) Sensing Scheme is presented for Content-Addressable Memories (CAMs). A simple ML voltage detector instead of a complicated fully differential one is proposed which enables ML voltage swing approaching to zero. Meanwhile, the scheme improves the robustness against process variation by means of voltage swing self-adjustment. Post-layout simulation results show the proposed 64-word × 144-bit ternary CAM, using 55-nm 1.2-V standard CMOS process, achieves 0.18fJ/bit/search for the ML power dissipation with less than 750ps search time. Normalized ML Energy-Delay-Product (EDP) achieves 0.14 fJ·ns/bit/search which accounts for 53.8% and 16.1% that of [7] and [8] separately.