Design of embedded TCAM based longest prefix match search engine

The content addressable memory (CAM) based solutions are very useful in network applications due to its high speed parallel search mechanism. This paper presents a novel Ternary CAM (TCAM) based NAND Pseudo CMOS-Longest Prefix Match (NPC-LPM) search engine. The proposed system provides a simple hardware based solution using novel 11T TCAM cell structures and NPC word line technique, for network routers. The experiments were performed on 256 x 128 NPC-LPM system under 0.13 mu m technology. The simulation result shows that the proposed design provides low power dissipation of 5.78 mW and high search speed of 315 MSearches/s under 1.3 V supply voltage. The presented NPC-LPM system meets the speed requirement of Optical Carrier (OC) 3072 with line-rate of 160 Gb/s in Ethernet networking and IPv6 protocol. The experimental results also show that the proposed system improves power-performance by 65%. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.