Impact of Initialization on Gate-based Area Efficient Ternary Content-Addressable Memory

Ternary content-addressable memory gives an address at the output after searching for the word that is provided at the input. The word ternary means that the said memory is capable of storing 'X' which represents the presence of '1' as well as '0'. Gate-based area efficient TCAM (G-AETCAM) uses flip-flops as storing media in the form of storing as well as masking element. These flip-flops are millions in number in the latest FPGA devices and are used only 1% in implementing G-AETCAM of size 64x36. In this paper, we have initialized the flip-flops to some binary value ('1' or '0'). Technically, these flip-flops are made SET when we want to initialize it by '1' and are made CLEAR if we need to store '0' in the corresponding storing or masking element. The said algorithm of initialization is implemented successfully on Xilinx Virtex-6 FPGA for 64 x 36 configuration which resulted in 3.45% decrease in power consumption and 0.83% increase in speed of the whole architecture.