Analog Memristive CAMs for Area- and Energy-Efficient Reconfigurable Computing

Abstract

Memory-based reconfigurable computing rose to outperform conventional FPGAs in logic function density, as well as being less impacted by the programmable interconnection. However, the major drawback is that the area and power overheads are significant, and this gets worse in high-density, high-performance Memory-based Computing (MBC) devices. In this brief, we investigate the usage of analog memristive CAMs to improve the area density of MBCs, thus enabling denser memories and smaller power consumption. Simulation results indicate significant area and energy savings, up to $2.2\times $ and $2.6\times $ , respectively, compared to the non-volatile counterparts, at the cost of increasing latency by up to 20%.