This article is presented by:
Vahid Tabatabaee
Content Addressable Memories
References
Title: Network Processors Architectures, Protocols, and Platforms
Author: Panos C. Lekkas
Publisher: McGraw-Hill
Kostas Pagiamtzis, Ali Sheikholeslami, “Content-Addressable Memory (CAM) Circuits and Architectures: A Tutorial and Survey,” IEEE J of Solid-State Circuits vol. 41, No.3, March 2006.
NetLogic MicroSystems Application Note, “Intradevice Configuration of Network Search Engines”.
NetLogic MicroSystems Application Note, “High Performance Layer 3 Forwarding”.
IDT White Paper, “Taking Packet Processing to the Next Level”.
Classification and Search Engines
Classification engine receives streams of packets as its input.
It applies a set of application-specific sorting rules and policies continuously on the packets.
It ends up compiling a series of new parallel packet streams in queues of packets.ored.
For classification the NP should consult a memory bank, a lookup table or even a data base where the rules are stored.
Search engines are used for consultation of a lookup table or a database based on rules and policies for the correct classification.
What is CAM?
Content Addressable Memory is a special kind of memory!
Read operation in traditional memory:
Input is address location of the content that we are interested in it.
Output is the content of that address.
In CAM it is the reverse:
Input is associated with something stored in the memory.
Output is location where the associated content is stored.
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