A 250 Msps, 0.5 W eDRAM-Based Search Engine Dedicated Low Power FIB Application

Hisashi IWAMOTO  Yuji YANO  Yasuto KURODA  Koji YAMAMOTO  Kazunari INOUE  Ikuo OKA  

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Electronics   Vol.E96-C   No.8   pp.1076-1082
Publication Date: 2013/08/01
Online ISSN: 1745-1353
DOI: 10.1587/transele.E96.C.1076
Print ISSN: 0916-8516
Type of Manuscript: PAPER
Category: Integrated Electronics
Keyword: 
router,  address lookup,  power consumption,  search engine,  TCAM,  low power,  

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Summary: 
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 ability to handle large lookup table capacity in IP routers. In this paper, we propose a commodity-memory 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 a fabricated test chip with 40 nm embedded DRAM (eDRAM) technology, and the effect of power reduction verified is greatly lower than conventional TCAM based and the energy metric achieve 0.01 fJ/bit/search. The power consumption is almost 0.5 W at 250 Msps and 8M entries.