Low Power RAM based CAM with Run Time Calculation of Last Index

Abstract

This paper proposes a method to overcome extra hardware by calculating the last index in run time, and reduce high power consumption using bank selection technique to divide the whole memory into 4 partitions, which reduce the power consumption, thereby eliminating the disadvantage of searching an input data in all the memory addresses. Although [1] configure RAM as a CAM is there to provide searching operation, however this method has disadvantages like high power consumption and extra memory for saving the value of last index. The proposed method logically dissects the memory into 4 partitions. Each partition is accessed through the first two bits of the input word, search operation is only performed in that particular partition (one quarter of whole memory), which saves the searching time and power consumption. To validate and justify our approach, a 16×16 memory is divided into four 4×16 memory chunks and implemented on Xilinx Virtex-6 FPGA.