CA-RAM: A High-Performance Memory Substrate for Search-Intensive Applications

This paper proposes a specialized memory structure called CA-RAM (Content Addressable Random Access Memory) to accelerate search operations present in many important real-world applications. Search operations can occupy a significant portion of total execution time and energy consumption, while posing a difficult performance problem to tackle using traditional memory hierarchy concepts. In essence, CA-RAM is a direct hardware implementation of the well-known hashing technique. Searchable records are stored in CA-RAM at a location determined by a hash function, defined on their search key. After a database has been built, looking up a record in CA-RAM typically involves a single memory access followed by a parallel key matching operation. Compared with a conventional CAM (Content Addressable Memory) solution, CA-RAM capitalizes on dense SRAM and DRAM designs, and achieves comparable search performance while occupying much smaller area and consuming significantly less power. This pa...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: ISPASS
• Authors: Sangyeun Cho, Joel R. Martin, Ruibin Xu, Mohammad H. Hammoud, Rami G. Melhem
• Keywords: Content Addressable Memory, ISPASS 2007, Random Access Memory, Search Operations, Software Engineering