GENERAL PURPOSE CONTENT-ADDRESSABLE MEMORY SUBSYSTEM

THIS PROGRAM WILL UTILIZE A CAM (CONTENT-ADDRESSABLE MEMORY) CHIP IN A MEMORY OPTION CARD FOR SUN WORKSTATIONS. THIS DESIGN WILL EFFICIENTLY SEARCH AND MANIPULATE VECTOR SPACE DATA. THE FINAL SYSTEM WILL BE CAPABLE OF PERFORMING OVER 1 TRILLION MAGNITUDE COMPARISONS PER SECOND. THE CAM SEARCHES SPATIALLY DISTRIBUTED DATA IN AN N-DIMENSIONAL SPACE AND MANIPULATES SUBSETS OF DATA WITHIN THAT SPACE. THE CAM CHIP CONTAINS 516 WORDS, EACH INCLUDING 32 DATA BITS AND 32 FLAG BITS. WORDS CAN BE SPLIT INTO A SELECTABLE NUMBER OF FIELDS, EACH TREATED AS AN INTEGER FOR MAGNITUDE COMPARISONS. IN ONE BUS CYCLE, ALL FIELDS IN ALL WORDS IN THE SYSTEM CAN BE COMPARED IN MAGNITUDE TO FIELDS IN AN INPUT DATA VECTOR. MAIN APPLICATIONS OF THIS SYSTEM ARE: PATTERN RECOGNITION, CIRCUIT SIMULATION EVENT QUEUING, SPARSE DISTRIBUTED MEMORY NEURAL NETS, VLSI PLACE AND ROUTE, SORTING REDUNDANT TARGET/TRAJECTORIES FROM MULTIPLE SENSORS.