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Recently, various magnetic non-volatile ternary content-addressable memory (MNV-TCAM) cells that use magnetic tunnel junctions (MTJs) as storage units have been proposed to realize zero standby power. However, they still suffer from low reliability and high power consumption for search operation. In addition, the restrictions on the ordering of the TCAM array required by the using of the priority encoder to resolve the multiple match problem due to the ‘X’ results in large delay and high energy consumption for update operation. To address these issues, the novel MNV-TCAM cell is first proposed, aiming to achieve high-speed, low-power, and high-reliable search operation. In addition to the search data operation, it can realize a search length operation. By exploiting this search length operation, we then present circuit-level design of the MNV-TCAM with a priority-decision in memory technology, which can utilize the length information of matched words sorted in an arbitrary order to decide the highest-priority matched word by performing a three-phase search operation. It implies that the restrictions on the ordering can be eliminated, thus, improving the update speed and energy-efficiency. Finally, hybrid CMOS/MTJ simulations are performed to demonstrate its functionality and evaluate its performance in terms of search reliability, search speed, and search energy consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, several magnetic tunnel junction (MTJ)-based non-volatile ternary content-addressable memory (NV-TCAM) cells have been proposed to realize zero standby power. However, they still suffer from low reliability and high power consumption during search operations. To address these issues, we propose a novel MTJ-based NV-TCAM cell, which is composed of 15 transistors and 4 MTJs (15T-4MTJ). By utilizing the differential MTJs with complementary states and positive feedback of cross-coupled inverters for sensing, the proposed 15T-4MTJ NV-TCAM cell can significantly improve the search reliability. Moreover, owing to that there is no static current during search operations, only dynamic charging and discharging current, it can achieve ultra-low power consumption. In addition, by using only one transistor as the critical path between the match-line and GND, its switch delay can be shortened, thereby realizing high-speed search operations. Hybrid CMOS/MTJ simulation results of the 144-bit word circuit show that the proposed 15T-4MTJ NV-TCAM cell can obtain a smaller search error rate of 2.7%, a higher search speed of 0.17 ns, and a lower search energy of 0.17 fJ/bit/search in comparison with other MTJ-based NV-TCAM cells. On the other hand, its write energy of 1.589 pJ/bit is about $3.64\times $ smaller than that of the previously proposed 10T-4MTJ NV-TCAM cell. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]