Voltage-Divider-Based Binary and Ternary Content-Addressable Memory (CAM) Exploiting Double-Barrier Magnetic Tunnel Junction

The efficiency of massively parallel search operations, along with the non-volatile (NV) capability of magnetic tunnel junction (MTJ), has raised significant interest for NV content-addressable memories (NV-CAMs). We propose an eight-transistor-two-MTJ (8T2MTJ) NV-TCAM based on the voltage-divider configuration, and the use of skew-butter to drive the response of the search signal. The design was evaluated under exhaustive Monte Carlo simulations. The 144-bit NV-TCAM presents demonstrates competitive performance compared to the current state-of-the-art designs. In particular, when compared to the best state-of-the-art voltage-divider alternative, the proposed design offers better search time (62.47%). In comparison to other topologies, the proposed design presents less (48.6%) SER, reduced (2.17×) search energy per bit, and better (60.43%) cell area footprint. This, at the only cost of slight increase in search time. These findings highlight the promising characteristics of our proposed design and their potential for high-density, and reliable search operations of NV-CAMs.