Indium gallium zinc
oxide (IGZO)-based ferroelectric
thin-film
transistors (FeTFTs) are being vigorously investigated for being deployed
in computing-in-memory (CIM) applications. Content-addressable memories
(CAMs) are the quintessential example of CIM, which conduct a parallel
search over a queue or stack to obtain the matched entries for a given
input data. CAM cells offer the ability for massively parallel searches
in a single clock cycle throughout an entire CAM array for the input
query, thereby enabling pattern matching and searching functionality.
Therefore, CAM cells are used extensively for pattern matching or
search operations in data-centric computing. This paper investigates
the impact of retention degradation on IGZO-based FeTFT on the multibit
operation in content CAM cell applications. We propose a scalable
multibit 1FeTFT-1T-based CAM cell composed of only one FeTFT and one
transistor, thus significantly improving the density and energy efficiency
compared with conventional complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor
(CMOS)-based CAM. We successfully demonstrate the operations of our
proposed CAM with storage and search by exploiting the multilevel
states of the experimentally calibrated IGZO-based FeTFT devices.
We also investigate the impact of retention degradation on the search
operation. Our proposed IGZO-based 3-bit and 2-bit CAM cell shows
104 s and 106 s retention, respectively. The
single-bit CAM cell shows lifelong (10 years) retention.