  In this work, we propose SEE-MCAM, scalable and compact multi-bit CAM (MCAM)
designs that utilize the three-terminal ferroelectric FET (FeFET) as the proxy.
By exploiting the multi-level-cell characteristics of FeFETs, our proposed
SEE-MCAM designs enable multi-bit associative search functions and achieve
better energy efficiency and performance than existing FeFET-based CAM designs.
We validated the functionality of our proposed designs by achieving 3 bits per
cell CAM functionality, resulting in 3x improvement in storage density. The
area per bit of the proposed SEE-MCAM cell is 8% of the conventional CMOS CAM.
We thoroughly investigated the scalability and robustness of the proposed
design. Evaluation results suggest that the proposed 2FeFET-1T SEE-MCAM
achieves 9.8x more energy efficiency and 1.6x less search latency compared to
the CMOS CAM, respectively. When compared to existing MCAM designs, the
proposed SEE-MCAM can achieve 8.7x and 4.9x more energy efficiency than
ReRAM-based and FeFET-based MCAMs, respectively. Benchmarking results show that
our approach provides up to 3 orders of magnitude improvement in speedup and
energy efficiency over a GPU implementation in accelerating a novel quantized
hyperdimensional computing (HDC) application.
