VLSI Design 
Volume 2008 (2008), Article ID 674259, 7 pages
doi:10.1155/2008/674259
Research Article

Power Considerations in Banked CAMs: A Leakage Reduction Approach

Pedro Echeverría, José L. Ayala, and Marisa López-Vallejo

Departamento de Ingeniería Electrónica, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, 28040 Madrid, Spain

Received 26 April 2007; Accepted 9 December 2007

Recommended by Jean-Baptiste Begueret

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%.