Zi-CAM: A Power and Resource Efficient Binary Content-Addressable Memory on FPGAs

Electronics

Zahid Ullah¹  Muhammad Irfan²  Ray C. C. Cheung² 

[1] Department of Electrical Engineering, CECOS University of IT and Emerging Sciences, Peshawar 25000, Pakistan;Department of Electronic Engineering, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong, China;

关键词: Associative memory;    content-addressable storage;    field-programmable gate arrays;    FPGA-based CAM;    memory architecture;    SRAM;    lookup table;   

DOI  :  10.3390/electronics8050584

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

Content-addressable memory (CAM) is a type of associative memory, which returns the address of a given search input in one clock cycle. Many designs are available to emulate the CAM functionality inside the re-configurable hardware, field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), using static random-access memory (SRAM) and flip-flops. FPGA-based CAMs are becoming popular due to the rapid growth in software defined networks (SDNs), which uses CAM for packet classification. Emulated designs of CAM consume much dynamic power owing to a high amount of switching activity and computation involved in finding the address of the search key. In this paper, we present a power and resource efficient binary CAM architecture, Zi-CAM, which consumes less power and uses fewer resources than the available architectures of SRAM-based CAM on FPGAs. Zi-CAM consists of two main blocks. RAM block (RB) is activated when there is a sequence of repeating zeros in the input search word; otherwise, lookup tables (LUT) block (LB) is activated. Zi-CAM is implemented on Xilinx Virtex-6 FPGA for the size 64 × 36 which improved power consumption and hardware cost by 30 and 32%, respectively, compared to the available FPGA-based CAMs.

【 授权许可】

Unknown