Yield Enhancement Techniques for Content-Addressable Memories

AbstractIn this paper, block-level reconfiguration techniques are proposed for content-addressable memories. The CAM words and redundant words are divided into blocks and reconfiguration is performed at the block level instead of the conventional word level. The reconfiguration mechanism used to implement our technique requires negligible hardware overhead. According to simulation results, the hardware overhead is 3.92 % for a 1-Mb CAM array. It also shows that our approach can improve fabrication yield significantly. 1