A Fast Power Estimation Method for Content Addressable Memory by Using SystemC Simulation Environment

摘要

Content addressable memory is widely used for fast lookup table data searching, but it often consumes considerable power. Moreover, designing the suitable content addressable memory architecture for a specific application also consumes lots of time, since the behavioral simulation is often done in the transistor level. SystemC is a system-level modeling language and simulation platform, providing high simulation efficiency for hardware software co-design. Unfortunately, SystemC does not provide the function for estimating power dissipation of a structure design. In this paper, a SystemC-based fast content addressable memory power estimation method is presented for estimating the power dissipation of the match-line circuit, the search-line circuit, and the storage cell array of content addressable memory in the early design stage. The mathematical equations and behavioral patterns are used as the inputs of power estimation model. The simulation results based on 10 Mibench benchmarks show that the simulation time of the proposed method is in average 1233 times faster than that of HSPICE simulator with only 3.51% error rate.