FPS-RAM: Fast Prefix Search RAM-Based Hardware for Forwarding Engine
Zaitsu Kazuya, Koji Yamamoto, Yasuto Kuroda, Kazunari Inoue, Shingo Ata, Ikuo Oka · IEICE Transactions on Communications · 2012
Ternary content addressable memory (TCAM) is becoming very popular for designing high-throughput forwarding engines on routers. However, TCAM has potential problems in terms of hardware and power costs, which limits its ability to deploy large amounts of capacity in IP routers. In this paper, we propose new hardware architecture for fast forwarding engines, called fast prefix search RAM-based hardware (FPS-RAM). We designed FPS-RAM hardware with the intent of maintaining the same search performance and physical user interface as TCAM because our objective is to replace the TCAM in the market. Our RAM-based hardware architecture is completely different from that of TCAM and has dramatically reduced the costs and power consumption to 62% and 52%, respectively. We implemented FPS-RAM on an FPGA to examine its lookup operation.