Current-based Design of Ferroelectric Approximate Search Memory

In the models with excellent fault-tolerance to hardware, approximate search can deal with the higher efficiency requirement of the amount of data and processing. A current based measurement scheme is proposed in this paper for the existing ternary content addressable memories in approximate search mode array suffered poor accuracy and scalability. The memory architecture is improved by ferroelectric field effect transistor aiming to achieve low power and area; the architecture of the proposed memory cell replaces the voltage-based output signal with the current-based one, which efficiently increase the scalability of the array; a sense amplifier which converts the analog signal to digital spike signal is introduced as the peripheral circuitry to measure the output of the mismatch numbers of the TCAM array. Through the transient simulation circuit in Hspice and Virtuoso software simulation platform, the result indicate that the high energy efficiency approximate search was successfully achieved.