Compact design of an MTJ-based non-volatile CAM cell with read/write operations

Abstract

This paper presents a novel design of a magnetic tunnel junction (MTJ) based content addressable memory (CAM) cell with low power dissipation and small-time delay. Magnetic properties of the spintronic device such as non-volatility, write endurance, small read–write delays, low switching current and so on, have been investigated in this paper. The proposed CAM cell design includes a simplified driver circuit to perform read/search and write operations using an optimum number of transistors. Performance parameters such as power dissipation, time-delay, power-delay product (PDP) and energy-delay product (EDP) of the proposed CAM cell are estimated and compared with the previously reported MTJ-based CAM cell already available in the literature. Simulation results obtained in this research work demonstrate that the proposed CAM cell successfully performs write operation at low voltages (up to 0.7 V). Write-time delay and the average power dissipation of the proposed CAM cell is found to be 0.375× and 0.449× less compared to the available MTJ-based CAM cell design. Apart from these, improvements in PDP and EDP of the proposed CAM cell is about 0.17× and 0.063× compared to the previously reported MTJ-based CAM cell, respectively. Performance improvements are also obtained in terms of time delay and power consumption during the read/search operations of the proposed CAM cell. During the read operation with 0.8 V supply, the time-delay, the average power consumption, PDP and EDP of the proposed CAM cell was found to be 0.53×, 0.64×, 0.34× and 0.18× less compared to the MTJ-based CAM cell already reported in the literature, respectively. Simulation results have been exhaustively verified using SPICE.