A 200Msps, 0.6W eDRAM-based search engine applying full-route capacity dedicated FIB application

Abstract

Ternary content addressable memory (TCAM) is popular LSI for use in high-throughput forwarding engines on routers. However, the unique structure applied in TCAM consume huge amounts of power, therefore it restricts the applicability to deployment for handling large lookup-table capacity in IP routers. In this paper, we propose a commoditymemory based hardware architecture for the forwarding information base (FIB) application that solves the substantial problems of power and density. The proposed architecture is examined by fabricated test chip with 40nm embedded DRAM (eDRAM) technology, and the effect of power reduction verified is 95% lower than conventional TCAM based.

Low-power area-efficient large-scale IP lookup engine based on binary-weighted clustered networks

“…In [3], several entries are shared using special-purpose CAM cells to reduce the number of entries required. In [4], the prefix match is realized by reading candidates from eDRAMs and hence the energy metric is very small. However, as the memory size is O(2 n ) where n is the word length, an unacceptably large memory of 10 39 Mb is required for long words (e.g.…”

“…The hardware of the LPM has been designed based on the use of ternary content-addressable memory (TCAM) [1,2,3,4], trie-based schemes [5,6], and hash-based schemes [7,8]. TCAMs compare a search word with all entries stored in TCAM cells in parallel and realize high-speed lookup operations.…”

Development of onboard LPM-based header processing and reactive link selection for optical packet and circuit integrated networks

“…The main reason for this is the use of TCAM (Ternary Content Addressable Memory) for looking up address information. Kuroda et al [13] developed a 40nm embedded DRAM-based forwarding engine LSI that uses 95% less power than a conventional TCAM-based one. Power consumption is 0.6W for the entire memory space occupied.…”

“…We recently developed a header processor incorporating the forwarding engine LSI based on [13] for contributing a highspeed, energy-efficient network. Figures 6(a) and 6(b) show a diagram and photograph of the header processor.…”

Demonstrating 100 Gbps optical packet switching using 16-bit longest prefix matching forwarding engine

“…Kuroda et al [8] have developed an address search engine LSI utilizing embedded DRAM (eDRAM) based 40 nm process technology, and verified power reduction down to 5% in the same environment as the current embedded TCAM based search engine works. The power consumption of the LSI is 0.6 W. This LSI is equipped with 432 Mbit memory, and holds all the prefixes from 0 to 23 bit.…”