Copyright © 2008 Pedro Echeverría et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

The content-based access of CAMs makes them of great interest in lookup-based operations. However, the large amounts of parallel comparisons required cause an expensive cost in power dissipation. In this work, we present a novel banked precomputation-based architecture for low-power and storage-demanding applications where the reduction of both dynamic and leakage power consumption is addressed. Experimental results show that the proposed banked architecture reduces up to an 89% of dynamic power consumption during the search process while the leakage power consumption is also minimized up to a 91%.