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The Associative Processing of Line Drawings (APLD) System utilizes a hardware associative memory and creates, modifies, deletes, stores, and retrieves two-dimensional line drawings consisting of points, tines, rectangles, and triangles. The APLD functions were duplicated on the TX-2 computer at M.I.T.'s Lincoln Laboratory under the LEAP Language and Data Structure. A comparison of the hardware approach with the software simulation illustrates the advantages of the hardware associative memory in three areas: (1) processing speed, (2) storage requirements, and (3) flexibility. The major problem areas of hardware associative memory technology, namely input/output and cost effectiveness, are also addressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ternary content-addressable memories (TCAMs) can perform high-speed and deterministic table lookups. However, its main drawback is high power consumption. A significant portion of the TCAM power is consumed by match-line sense amplifiers (MLSAs) for match detection. This paper presents a 20-kilobit TCAM featuring two MLSAs with positive-feedback techniques. The proposed circuits have been fabricated on a test chip in 0.18-μm CMOS technology. Energy measurement results of the two MLSAs show reductions of 56% and 48%, respectively, over the conventional current-race MLSA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]