Soft error tolerant Content Addressable Memories (CAMs) using error detection codes and duplication

Abstract

Soft Errors are becoming a major concern for modern computing systems. Memories are one of the elements affected by soft errors, which cause bitflips in some of the cells. A number of techniques such as the use of Error Correction Codes (ECCs), interleaving or scrubbing are utilized to mitigate the effects of soft errors on memories. Content Addressable Memories (CAMs) pose additional challenges, as many of those protection techniques are not applicable to CAMs. In this paper, a novel protection technique for CAMs is proposed, showing a convenient way to tackle false positives and negatives, and quantitatively studying the achieved benefit in reliability. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.