Data Retention-Based Low Leakage Power TCAM for Network Packet Routing

The ternary content addressable memory (TCAM) is widely used in the routing table due to its high lookup performance. However, a large number of transistors would cause the power consumption of TCAM to be considerable. In this brief, a new state-preserved technique, named data retention based TCAM (DR-TCAM), is proposed to reduce the leakage power dissipated in the TCAM memory. According to the continuous feature of mask data, the DR-TCAM can dynamically adapt the power source of mask cells so as to reduce the TCAM leakage power. Particularly, the mask data wouldn’t be destroyed in the DR-TCAM. Based on TSMC 40nm technology, the simulation results show that the DR-TCAM performs better than the state-of-the-art works. Compared to the traditional TCAM design, the DR-TCAM can deliver a TCAM leakage power reduction of 41% for a collection of real routing tables. Besides, the total power reduction is about 12%.