Semiconductor associative memory

摘要

This invention provides an associative memory composed of plural chips or a single chip which is preferably used in the fields of bandwidth compression for video images in mobile communication terminals and artificial intelligence systems. The associative memory is a small-area associative memory formed using CMOS technology with a fast parallel minimum-distance-search capability. The transistor number of the provided search circuit is only linear proportional to the number of rows of the associative memory. Therefore, the increase in the number of required circuits is small even if the unit number of the input data or the unit number of the reference data is large. With the associative memory, it is possible to realize the functions of video signal compression and object recognition necessary for artificial intelligence systems, data bank systems and mobile network terminals with a single chip or plural chips.