An Efficient Soft Error Tolerant Approach to Enhance Reliability of TCAM

Ternary Content Addressable Memory (TCAM) is a kind of extraordinary memory which is used to search operations in routers, firewalls, network address translators, and entire content in a single clock cycle. It is a special kind of memory which is used in highly reliable network applications. These systems require high reliability since a single error may interrupt any computation which may cause total system failure. However, TCAM is facing serious reliability challenges due to soft errors. The probability of soft errors in TCAM is increasing progressively due to alpha-particle, cosmic rays, high-vitality particles, and ionizing impacts of barometrical neutron. In order to minimize the risks of soft errors in TCAM, a new idea is proposed in this paper where the search key is constructed in a tricky way and the contents of the TCAM are ordered in a sequential pattern. The proposed method provides soft error tolerance with a low data overhead. Experimental study shows how the proposed method outperforms the existing method to tolerate soft error.