Low power high speed Ternary Content Addressable Memory design using 8 MOSFETs and 4 memristors - hybrid structure

Ternary Content Addressable Memory (TCAM) compares a stored word in its memory with a search word and returns the address of the stored word. In this paper we have proposed a memristor based TCAM cell which has only 8 transistors and 4 memristors whereas a conventional transistor based TCAM cell consists of 16 transistors. The average search energy per bit of the proposed Memristor based TCAM cell is almost 70.9% smaller and the search time in the proposed cell is almost 71% smaller than the corresponding quantities in a 16T TCAM cell. The voltage margin of our proposed cell is 138.9% higher than that in a 16T cell. Moreover, the required area for layout design of the proposed cell is almost 64% smaller than that of the 16T cell. Hence, our proposed Transistor-memristor hybrid structure shows superior performance in terms of speed, energy consumption, voltage margin and area occupancy.