NEC has developed content addressable memory (CAM) which the company says maintains the same high operation speed and non-volatile operation as existing circuits when processing and storing data on a circuit while power is off.
The new CAM, which is developed in association with Tohoku University, is a part of spintronics logic integrated circuit technologies that utilise the negative properties of electrons together with the spin magnetic moment.
The CAM utilises the vertical magnetisation of vertical domain wall elements in reaction to magnetic substances in order to enable data that is processing within the CAM to be stored on a circuit without using power, unlike the conventional technologies that required data to be stored within memory.
The company claims that use of the new CAM in combination with existing nonvolatile memory is related to greater non-volatility of CPU for electronics and other storage devices, and enables the development of electronics that start instantly and consume zero electricity while in standby mode.
The new CAM features high-speed data retrieval, spreads approximately half the circuit area in comparison to existing technologies, by reducing the number of transistors from eight to three in every two cells by sharing transistors.
