Reliable Associative Lookup in Content-Addressable Memory

Content Addressable Memory (CAM) is an important memory paradigm, which performs fast search by comparing an input query against all stored entries in parallel, achieving $O(1)$ lookup complexity. CAM is typically built upon conventional memory technologies, such as SRAM and Non-Volatile Memory (NVM). Accordingly, CAM can also be subject to the reliability challenges of these underlying technologies. In traditional memory systems, protection codes play a critical role in ensuring reliability and have been extensively studied. However, protection codes for CAM have remained largely unexplored. This paper takes an initial step toward addressing this longstanding gap by introducing a non-traditional code design.