Optimistic regular expression matching on FPGAs for near-data processing
Andreas Becher, Stefan Wildermann, Jürgen Teich · 2018
Regular expressions (regex) are the main means to search for specific patterns in the vast amount of stored textual information. As a consequence, different designs of hardware accelerators have been proposed that enable memory-bound regex processing. Here, the regular expression to be evaluated is translated to a non-deterministic (NFA) or deterministic finite automaton (DFA) which is then mapped onto the hardware design. The available hardware resources of the design imply the maximum size (in terms of amount of states and transitions) of the supported automata. However, regular expressions may be arbitrarily complex.