TCAM-based flow lookup design on FPGA and its applications
Tuan Nguyen-Viet, Duc-Hung Le · 2015
TCAM is now emulated using FPGAs and based on memory known as RAM or register. Most of them are made just using register- or RAM-based resource individually when mapped to FPGA hardware. This paper presents a 4×4 flexible Basic-TCAM architecture that can be flexibly designed based selectively on memory-based or register-based FPGA resource or both of them in combined manner. In addition, it can also allow a scalable architecture. A wider and deeper TCAM of size 512×36 built based on it seizes only 73,728 bits and 1,503 logic utilization and supports competitive search latency of 1 clock cycle over Altera Cyclone V FPGA. A typical flow lookup design based on this Basic-TCAM architecture uses a TCAM of size 4×16 and a simple parser to do a flow lookup. This design application is then taken place in a simple VLAN-based switch system for further feasible application of the TCAM in this work.