Integrated CAM-RAM Functionality using Ferroelectric FETs

Sumitha George1, Nicolas Jao2, Akshay Krishna Ramanathan2, Xueqing Li3, Sumeet Kumar Gupta4, John Sampson2, Vijaykrishnan Narayanan2
1Pennsylvania State University, 2PSU, 3Tsinghua University, 4Purdue University


Abstract

Our work proposes, a new Ferroelectric FET (FeFET) based Ternary Content Addressable Memory (TCAM) with features of integrated search and read operations (along with write), which we refer to as TCAM-RAM. The proposed memory exploits the unique features of the emerging FeFET technology, such as 3-terminal device design, storage in the gate stack, etc., to achieve the proposed functionality. We also introduce Approximate CAM-RAM, which can quantize the bit vector similarity. All the proposed designs operate without negative voltages. We describe both NAND and NOR variants of CAMdesign. Our CAM design provides 31% area improvement over the previous FeFET 6T CAM design.