Ternary Memory Composed of Ferroelectric Field-Effect Transistor Based on Dynamic Logic

Ternary Content Addressable Memory (TCAM) is widely used in development areas such as network routers and machine learning, which are receiving significant attention. Ferroelectric field-effect transistors (FeFETs) are among the most promising devices currently being researched in the field of advanced complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technology. FeFETs also possess a unique hysteresis in the I<inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">ds</inf>-V<inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">gs</inf> characteristics, which allows the device to function as both a switch and a non-volatile (NV) memory element. Traditional TCAM has the problems of VTH drop or search disturbance. We leverage FeFET property to construct a novel TCAM based on dynamic logic that can be integrated as efficient and compact logic elements into various levels of the memory hierarchy. Due to the slow trend of performance scaling based on Moore's Law and the fact that many computational tasks are now more data-centric than compute-centric, it is highly necessary to design efficient and compact logic elements based on emerging technologies to enhance performance and conserve energy consumption.