Perspective: Content-addressable memories as a computing primitive for today's AI and beyond
Abstract
Modern artificial intelligence is predominantly executed on computing architectures optimized for dense linear algebra. While this has enabled the success of contemporary neural networks and motivated compute-in-memory (CIM) architectures, a growing class of artificial intelligence (AI) workloads depends on associative retrieval, identifying stored information by content or similarity rather than by explicit memory addresses. Such operations are central to transformer attention, tree-based inference, genomic search, and other retrieval-intensive applications, yet remain inefficiently supported by conventional memory systems. In this Perspective, we argue that content-addressable memories (CAMs) provide a complementary hardware primitive for associative processing in AI. We review their ability to perform massively parallel in-memory matching, discuss how emerging memory technologies can improve density and energy efficiency, and identify hierarchical search, application-specific architectures, hardware-aware learning, and heterogeneous integration with CIM as key directions for scalable associative computing. Together, these developments suggest that associative retrieval should complement linear algebra as a foundational computing primitive for future AI systems.
Authors 5
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RWTH Aachen University · Forschungszentrum Jülich
Affiliation as printed
Faculty of Electrical Engineering , RWTH Aachen University , Aachen , Germany
Peter Grünberg Institute (PGI-14) , Forschungszentrum Jülich , Jülich , Germany
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Affiliation as printed
Center for Advanced Semiconductors and Integrated Circuits , The University of Hong Kong , Pokfulam , Hong Kong SAR , China
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering , The University of Hong Kong , Pokfulam , Hong Kong SAR , China
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Affiliation as printed
Center for Advanced Semiconductors and Integrated Circuits , The University of Hong Kong , Pokfulam , Hong Kong SAR , China
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering , The University of Hong Kong , Pokfulam , Hong Kong SAR , China
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Affiliation as printed
Center for Advanced Semiconductors and Integrated Circuits , The University of Hong Kong , Pokfulam , Hong Kong SAR , China
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering , The University of Hong Kong , Pokfulam , Hong Kong SAR , China
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RWTH Aachen University · Forschungszentrum Jülich
Affiliation as printed
Faculty of Electrical Engineering , RWTH Aachen University , Aachen , Germany
Peter Grünberg Institute (PGI-14) , Forschungszentrum Jülich , Jülich , Germany