In this paper, a novel content addressable memory (CAM) structure is proposed to improve the performance of a static divided word matching (SDWM) CAM. In the SDWM CAM, a small pmos has to be used to keep a noise margin, but it degrades performance significantly. To resolve this problem, a conditional driver is introduced in the proposed serial-parallel CAM. Performance is improved by 28.0% without additional power consumption at a cost of about 5.6% increased area when the total bit number is 32 with four series bits and 30% of VDD is allowed as noise.