Smart Ternary Content Addressable Memory (STCAM) architecture

A novel architecture of Smart Ternary Content Addressable Memory (STCAM) has been presented in this paper. The STCAM provides smarter comparison mechanism which scales to more efficient CAM as compared to most of the existing CAMs those provide only the equality information of all the stored data key in the memory against a search key. The comparison mechanism in the STCAM provides greater, equal and lesser than signals which could be broadly used in lookup tables, networking, databases, and pattern matching. In the proposed architecture, word access is not restricted to only exact matches, but could support variety of word retrieval conditions (comparison result set of greater, equal or lesser signals) to range matching (all possible combinations of greater-equal-lesser signals) of memory content on a specific search key.