An advanced associative comparator integrated circuit

An area-efficient high-performance associative comparator has been developed using standard and custom cells. Although a conservative fabrication technology was used, the throughput of the programmable window comparator (PWC) array exceeds the equivalent of 3×10⁹ 8-bit arithmetic operations/second. The architecture can be directly scaled to implement larger associative comparators and significant performance improvements are achievable with advanced CMOS or BICMOS fabrication technologies