In this paper, a novel content addressable memory (CAM) structure is proposed to improve the performance of a static divided word matching (SDWM) CAM. In the SDWM CAM, a small pmos has to be used to keep a noise margin, but it degrades performance significantly. To resolve this problem, a conditional driver is introduced in the proposed serial-parallel CAM. Performance is improved by 28.0% without additional power consumption at a cost of about 5.6% increased area when the total bit number is 32 with four series bits and 30% of VDD is allowed as noise.

This letter presents a race-free mixed serial-parallel comparison (RFMSPC) scheme which uses both serial and parallel CAMs in a match line. A self-reset search line scheme for the serial CAM is proposed to avoid the timing race problem and additional timing penalties. Various 32 entry CAMs are designed using 90 nm 1.2 V CMOS process to verify the proposed RFMSPC scheme. It shows that the RFMSPC saves power consumption by 40%, 53% and 63% at the cost of a 4%, 6% and 16% increase in search time according to 1, 2, and 4 serial CAM bits in a match line.