@inproceedings{3ba5a6e394894d2ca8ed61a9adfcd62d,
title = "A methodology for power characterization of associative memories",
abstract = "Content Addressable Memories (CAM) have become increasingly more important in applications requiring high speed memory search due to their inherent massively parallel processing architecture. We present a complete power analysis methodology for CAM systems to aid the exploration of their power-performance trade-offs in future systems. Our proposed methodology uses detailed transistor level circuit simulation of power behavior and a handful of input data types to simulate full chip power consumption. Furthermore, we applied our power analysis methodology on a custom designed associative memory test chip. This chip was developed by Fermilab for the purpose of developing high performance real-Time pattern recognition on high volume data produced by a future large-scale scientific experiment. We applied our methodology to configure a power model for this test chip. Our model is capable of predicting the total average power within 4% of actual power measurements. Our power analysis methodology can be generalized and applied to other CAM-like memory systems and accurately characterize their power behavior.",
keywords = "Content addressable memory (CAM), NAND cell, NOR cell, Pattern Recognition, Ternary cell, VLSI circuits, digital electronic circuits, power modeling",
author = "Dawei Li and Siddhartha Joshi and Seda Ogrenci-Memik and James Hoff and Sergo Jindariani and Tiehui Liu and Jamieson Olsen and Nhan Tran",
note = "Funding Information: Visiting Scholars Program, NSF CCF-1218768, and CCF-1422489 Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2015 IEEE.; 33rd IEEE International Conference on Computer Design, ICCD 2015 ; Conference date: 18-10-2015 Through 21-10-2015",
year = "2015",
month = dec,
day = "14",
doi = "10.1109/ICCD.2015.7357156",
language = "English (US)",
series = "Proceedings of the 33rd IEEE International Conference on Computer Design, ICCD 2015",
publisher = "Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.",
pages = "491--498",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 33rd IEEE International Conference on Computer Design, ICCD 2015",
address = "United States",
}