Low power high speed ternary content addressable memory design using MOSFET and memristors

This paper proposes a 12 transistor (12T) NOR type hybrid MOSFET and Memristor based Ternary Content Addressable Memory (TCAM) system. The design is compared with conventional 16T TCAM circuit that uses only MOSFETs. The average search energy per bit of the proposed Memristor based TCAM cell is almost 70% smaller and the search time in the proposed cell is almost 43% smaller than that of the 16T TCAM cell. The voltage margin of the proposed cell is higher than that in a 16T cell. Moreover, the required area for layout design of the proposed cell is almost 27% smaller than that of the 16T cell. Therefore, the proposed TCAM shows significant performance improvement than conventional design and is a promising alternative for future low power high speed memory application.