Modular Scheme for Designing Special PurposeAssociative Memories and Beyond

The use of associative memories—storage devices that allow data retrieval based on contents—has often beensuggested to speed up the performance of many applications. Until recently, using such content-addressablememories (CAMs) was unfeasible due to their high hardware cost. However, the advent of VLSI has made theclass of fully-parallel associative memory cost-effective for implementation. This paper briefly overviews designof several fully parallel associative memories proposed in the literature, concentrating on the design of fully-parallelθ-search CAMs