Approximate Content-Addressable Memories: A Review

Content-addressable memory (CAM) has been part of the memory market for more than five decades. CAM can carry out a single clock cycle lookup based on the content rather than an address. Thanks to this attractive feature, CAM is utilized in memory systems where a high-speed content lookup technique...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published inChips Vol. 2; no. 2; pp. 70 - 82
Main Authors Garzón, Esteban, Yavits, Leonid, Teman, Adam, Lanuzza, Marco
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published MDPI AG 30.03.2023
Subjects
approximate CAM
associative memory
associative processor
CAM
content-addressable memory
ternary CAM
Online AccessGet full text

Cover

More Information
Summary:Content-addressable memory (CAM) has been part of the memory market for more than five decades. CAM can carry out a single clock cycle lookup based on the content rather than an address. Thanks to this attractive feature, CAM is utilized in memory systems where a high-speed content lookup technique is required. However, typical CAM applications only support exact matching, as opposed to approximate matching, where a certain Hamming distance (several mismatching characters between a query pattern and the dataset stored in CAM) needs to be tolerated. Recent interest in approximate search has led to the development of new CAM-based alternatives, accelerating the processing of large data workloads in the realm of big data, genomics, and other data-intensive applications. In this review, we provide an overview of approximate CAM and describe its current and potential applications that would benefit from approximate search computing.
ISSN:2674-0729
2674-0729
DOI:10.3390/chips2020005