Associative memories are structures that can retrieve previously stored
information given a partial input pattern instead of an explicit address as in
indexed memories. A few hardware approaches have recently been introduced for a
new family of associative memories based on Sparse-Clustered Networks (SCN)
that show attractive features. These architectures are suitable for
implementations with low retrieval latency, but are limited to small networks
that store a few hundred data entries. In this paper, a new hardware
architecture of SCNs is proposed that features a new data-storage technique as
well as a method we refer to as Selective Decoding (SD-SCN). The SD-SCN has
been implemented using a similar FPGA used in the previous efforts and achieves
two orders of magnitude higher capacity, with no error-performance penalty but
with the cost of few extra clock cycles per data access.Comment: 4 pages, Accepted in IEEE Global SIP 2013 conferenc
