Design space explorations of Hybrid-Partitioned TCAM (HP-TCAM)

Even though, TCAM provides search operation in a constant time, when compared with Static Random Access Memories (SRAMs), TCAMs have certain limitations such as low storage density, relatively slow access time, low scalability, complex circuitry, and expensive costs. Hence, the need for a TCAM architecture arises that can use SRAM (with additional logic) to behave like TCAM. This paper presents the idea of Hybrid-Partitioned, SRAM-based architecture (HP-TCAM), which provides the same functionality as TCAM. We implemented and analyzed an example design of 512 × 36 HP-TCAM on Xilinx FPGAs with its different design parameters. Energy/bit/search, as an important metric, for the design is 47.13 fJ on Virtex-7 FPGA. Furthermore, we have provided in detail, all the implementation results and power consumption for our designs. © 2013 IEEE.