Survey on Content Addressable Memory and Sparse Clustered Network

Most memory devices store and retrieve data by addressing specific memory locations. As a result, this path often becomes the limiting factor for systems that rely on fast memory accesses. The time required to find an item stored in memory can be reduced considerably if the item can be identified for access by its content rather than by its address. A memory that is accessed in this way is called content-addressable memory or CAM. Content Addressable Memory provides a performance advantage over other memory search algorithms, such as binary or tree-based searches or look-aside tag buffers, by comparing the desired information against the entire list of pre-stored entries simultaneously, often resulting in an order-of-magnitude reduction in the search time. Different Content Addressable Memory algorithms are available today, each of them having its own advantages as well as disadvantages. Here a comparative study on different Content Addressable Memory architecture and algorithm is done. The introduction of Sparse Clustered Network (SCN) had a great impact on Content Addressable Memory designs. A low power Content Addressable Memory based on Sparse Clustered Networks has been proposed. The dynamic energy consumption of the proposed design is significantly lower compared with that of other conventional low-power Content Addressable