Yen-Jen Chang
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%.
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Digital Library
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Index Terms
- A low-power TCAM design using mask-aware match-line (MAML) technique
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