Non-Volatile Content-Addressable Memory for Energy-Efficient & High-Performance Search and Update Operations

This work presents a non-volatile content-addressable memory (NV-CAM) based on double-barrier magnetic tunnel junction technology (DMTJ). Unlike state-of-the-art NV-CAM designs that present low-performance updates, our NV-CAM allows energy-efficient, high-performance search and update operations. This makes it well-suited for applications requiring a high frequency of searches/updates, such as associative processors. The NV-CAM hybrid CMOS/DMTJ was designed using a commercial 65nm CMOS technology and a Verilog-A-based DMTJ compact model. The NV-CAM evaluation was carried out by employing Monte Carlo simulations while accounting for process variations. Simulation results show that our NV-CAM presents competitive figures of merit compared to state-of-the-art design. Our NV-CAM presents energy-efficient operations and reduces the update and search delay by about 71% and 75%, respectively, compared to other NV-CAMs.