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 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 40nm embedded DRAM (eDRAM) technology, and the effect of power reduction verified is greatly lower than conventional TCAM based and the energy metric achieve 0.01fJ/bit/search. The power consumption is almost 0.5W at 250Msps and 8M entries.
