Design and evaluation of a 5-input majority gate-based content-addressable memory cell in quantum-dot cellular automata

Abstract

Quantum-dot cellular automata (QCA) has been introduced as an emerging nanotechnology for circuit design. This technology is one of the best alternatives to the CMOS circuits. In QCA circuits, inverter and majority gates are the essential building blocks of different circuits. Moreover, in recent applications low-power architectures have become very important. Accordingly, we need to design low-power elements. Content addressable memory (CAM) is a kind of memory which can be used in very fast searching applications. In this paper, a single layer content addressable memory (CAM) cell is proposed. The proposed design has achieved significant improvements in terms of complexity, area and energy consumption.