Testing Comparison Faults of Ternary Content Addressable Memories with Asymmetric Cells," ATS

Abstract — Ternary content addressable memory (TCAM) is one key component in the dedicated hardware modulars for high-performance networking applications. Symmetric and asym-metric cells are two widely used cell structures in TCAMs. An asymmetric cell consists of a binary content addressable memory (BCAM) bit and a mask bit. This paper proposes two march-like test algorithms, and , to cover the comparison faults of the BCAM cell and the comparison logic faults of the masking cell. requires 7 Write operations and (3+2) Compare operations to cover the comparison faults of an -bit TCAM with Hit output only. requires 4 Write operations and (3+2) Compare operations to cover the comparison faults of an -bit TCAM with priority address encoder (PAE) output. I