# Analog content addressable memories with memristors

## TL;DR

This paper introduces an analog content-addressable-memory design using memristors that leverages their conductance tunability to reduce area and power consumption, enabling faster and more versatile pattern matching applications.

## Contribution

It presents a novel analog CAM architecture with memristors, overcoming limitations of binary/ternary schemes and expanding application potential.

## Key findings

- Reduces area and power consumption compared to traditional designs
- Demonstrates feasibility through experiments and simulations
- Enables new computing applications with analog data storage

## Abstract

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.