Li Can, Graves Catherine E, Sheng Xia, Miller Darrin, Foltin Martin, Pedretti Giacomo, Strachan John Paul
Hewlett Packard Labs, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Palo Alto, CA, 94304, USA.
Silicon Design Lab, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Fort Collins, CO, 80528, USA.
Nat Commun. 2020 Apr 2;11(1):1638. doi: 10.1038/s41467-020-15254-4.
A content-addressable memory compares an input search word against all rows of stored words in an array in a highly parallel manner. While supplying a very powerful functionality for many applications in pattern matching and search, it suffers from large area, cost and power consumption, limiting its use. Past improvements have been realized by using memristors to replace the static random-access memory cell in conventional designs, but employ similar schemes based only on binary or ternary states for storage and search. We propose a new analog content-addressable memory concept and circuit to overcome these limitations by utilizing the analog conductance tunability of memristors. Our analog content-addressable memory stores data within the programmable conductance and can take as input either analog or digital search values. Experimental demonstrations, scaled simulations and analysis show that our analog content-addressable memory can reduce area and power consumption, which enables the acceleration of existing applications, but also new computing application areas.
内容可寻址存储器以高度并行的方式将输入的搜索词与数组中存储的所有词行进行比较。虽然它为模式匹配和搜索中的许多应用提供了非常强大的功能，但它存在面积大、成本高和功耗大的问题，限制了其应用。过去的改进是通过使用忆阻器取代传统设计中的静态随机存取存储器单元来实现的，但仅采用基于二进制或三进制状态的类似方案进行存储和搜索。我们提出了一种新的模拟内容可寻址存储器概念和电路，通过利用忆阻器的模拟电导可调性来克服这些限制。我们的模拟内容可寻址存储器在可编程电导内存储数据，并且可以将模拟或数字搜索值作为输入。实验演示、缩放模拟和分析表明，我们的模拟内容可寻址存储器可以减少面积和功耗，这不仅能够加速现有应用，还能开启新的计算应用领域。
