Data Intelligent Low Power High Performance TCAM for IP-Address Lookup Table

Abstract

This paper represents current research in low-power Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) domain. Nowadays low power has become more sought research topic in electronic industry. Power dissipation is the most important area while designing the VLSI chip. Today almost all of the high speed switching devices include the Ternary Content Addressable Memory (TCAM) as one of the most important features. When a device consumes less power that becomes reliable and it would work with more efficiency. Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) technology is best known for low power consumption devices. This paper aims at designing a router application device which consumes less power and works more efficiently. Various strategies, methodologies and power management techniques for low power circuits and systems are discussed in this research. From this research the challenges could be developed that might be met while designing low power high performance circuit. This work aims at developing Data Aware AND-type match line architecture for TCAM. A TCAM macro of 256 × 128 was designed using Cadence Advanced Development Environment (ADE) with 90 nm technology file from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC). The result shows that the proposed Data Aware architecture provides around 35% speed and 45% power improvement over existing architecture.