Efficient Analog CAM Design

TL;DR

This paper introduces two novel analog CAM cell designs that enhance data encoding robustness and density, supported by a methodology for optimal margin selection and comprehensive performance comparisons.

Contribution

It presents new aCAM cell designs and a methodology for data encoding optimization, advancing energy efficiency and robustness over prior aCAM implementations.

Findings

Improved data encoding robustness and density.

Enhanced energy efficiency and reduced latency.

Comprehensive comparison demonstrating advantages over prior work.

Abstract

Content Addressable Memories (CAMs) are considered a key-enabler for in-memory computing (IMC). IMC shows order of magnitude improvement in energy efficiency and throughput compared to traditional computing techniques. Recently, analog CAMs (aCAMs) were proposed as a means to improve storage density and energy efficiency. In this work, we propose two new aCAM cells to improve data encoding and robustness as compared to existing aCAM cells. We propose a methodology to choose the margin and interval width for data encoding. In addition, we perform a comprehensive comparison against prior work in terms of the number of intervals, noise sensitivity, dynamic range, energy, latency, area, and probability of failure.