Hardware emulation of Memristor based Ternary Content Addressable Memory

MTCAM (Memristor Ternary Content Addressable Memory) is a special purpose storage medium in which data could be retrieved based on the stored content. Using Memristors as the main storage element provides the potential of achieving higher density and more efficient solutions than conventional methods. A key missing item in the validation of such approaches is the wide spread availability of hardware emulation platforms that can provide reliable and repeatable performance statistics. In this paper, we present a hardware MTCAM emulation based on 2-Transistors-2Memristors (2T2M) bit-cell. It builds on a bipolar memristor model with storing and fetching capabilities based on the actual current-voltage behaviour. The proposed design offers a flexible verification environment with quick design revisions, high execution speeds and powerful debugging techniques. The proposed design is modeled using VHDL and prototyped on Xilinx Virtex® FPGA.