An Ultra-Compact Single FeFET Binary and Multi-Bit Associative Search Engine

Xunzhao Yin; Franz Müller; Qingrong Huang; Chao Li; Mohsen Imani; Zeyu Yang; Jiahao Cai; Maximilian Lederer; Ricardo Olivo; Nellie Laleni; Shan Deng; Zijian Zhao; Cheng Zhuo; Thomas Kämpfe; Kai Ni

arXiv · 2203.07948

An Ultra-Compact Single FeFET Binary and Multi-Bit Associative Search Engine

Xunzhao Yin·Franz Müller·Qingrong Huang·Chao Li·Mohsen Imani·Zeyu Yang·Jiahao Cai·Maximilian Lederer·Ricardo Olivo·Nellie Laleni·Shan Deng·Zijian Zhao·Cheng Zhuo·Thomas Kämpfe·Kai Ni

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Abstract

Content addressable memory (CAM) is widely used in associative search tasks for its highly parallel pattern matching capability. To accommodate the increasingly complex and data-intensive pattern matching tasks, it is critical to keep improving the CAM density to enhance the performance and area efficiency. In this work, we demonstrate: i) a novel ultra-compact 1FeFET CAM design that enables parallel associative search and in-memory hamming distance calculation; ii) a multi-bit CAM for exact search using the same CAM cell; iii) compact device designs that integrate the series resistor current limiter into the intrinsic FeFET structure to turn the 1FeFET1R into an effective 1FeFET cell; iv) a successful 2-step search operation and a sufficient sensing margin of the proposed binary and multi-bit 1FeFET1R CAM array with sizes of practical interests in both experiments and simulations, given the existing unoptimized FeFET device variation; v) 89.9x speedup and 66.5x energy efficiency improvement over the state-of-the art alignment tools on GPU in accelerating genome pattern matching applications through the hyperdimensional computing paradigm.

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Xunzhao Yin, Franz Müller, Qingrong Huang, Chao Li, Mohsen Imani, Zeyu Yang, Jiahao Cai, Maximilian Lederer, Ricardo Olivo, Nellie Laleni, Shan Deng, Zijian Zhao, Cheng Zhuo, Thomas Kämpfe, Kai Ni. 2022-03-15. An Ultra-Compact Single FeFET Binary and Multi-Bit Associative Search Engine. https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.07948

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