Cross-layer Modeling and Design of Content Addressable Memories in Advanced Technology Nodes for Similarity Search

Abstract

In this paper we present a comprehensive design and benchmarking study of Content Addressable Memory (CAM) at the 7nm technology node in the context of similarity search applications. We design CAM cells based on SRAM, spin-orbit torque, and ferroelectric field effect transistor devices and from their layouts extract cell parasitics using state of the art EDA tools. These parasitics are used to develop SPICE netlists to model search operations. We use a CAM-based dataset search and a sequential recommendation system to highlight the application-level performance degradation due to interconnect parasitics. We propose and evaluate two solutions to mitigate interconnect effects.