ASSOCIATIVE MEMORY AND ENCODING CIRCUIT TO BE APPLIED TO THE MEMORY

摘要

PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED: To facilitate the managing of invalid memory words by holding hit flags and empty flags in registers and successively outputting addresses of invalid memory words corresponding to the empty flags in accordance with a priority order. ;SOLUTION: Hit flags being the result after coincident retrievals among retieval data and respective memory words are performed are stored in registers 36a and logical sums for every subblock 32 are held in a subencoder 28a and the hit flags are made into active states in accordance with a priority order to be successively outputted and addresses of corresponding subblocks 32 are encoded to be outputted as addresses of memory words corresponding to respective hit flags together with memory words from a main encoder 12a. Moreover, registers 36b storing empty flags are provided and invalid memory words 34 corresponding to the priority order are managed similarly with hit flags. Furthermore, the encoding of addresses corresponding to either of the hit flags or the empty flags is decided in a timing control circuit 60a.;COPYRIGHT: (C)1999,JPO