ASSOCIATIVE MEMORY AND DATA RETRIEVAL METHOD OF ASSOCIATIVE MEMORY

摘要

PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED: To enable reduction of power consumption during the search operation by providing an identifying means to identify existence of data stored in a memory block and then retrieval only the memory block which as identified existence of data. ;SOLUTION: An associative memory is provided with a valid cell 10 for holding data writing of each address within the address range corresponding to a memory block n. When an address ni is designated with an addressing signal, a memory cell M(ni) corresponding to address ni is designated with an address decoder 14 and data is written to the M(ni). When the data is written to M(ni), condition of data V(ni) held by the valid cell corresponding to such address changes and V(ni) is switched to '1' from '0'. When data is written at least to one of the memories from M(n1) to M(ni), it can be determined and detected that data exists in the memory block n.;COPYRIGHT: (C)2000,JPO