Hardware Accelerators for Regular Expression Matching and Approximate String Matching

AbstractThis paper introduces hardware accelerators for regular expression matching and approximate string matching. The hardware for regular expression matching accepts a subclass of regular expressions, and achieves a high throughput string matching for a wide range of patterns. In addition, since the hardware is pattern-independent, we can update patterns immediately without reconguring the hardware. Therefore, it is useful for applications that require quick pattern updating, such as network intrusion detection. The hardware for approximate string matching calculates the edit distance as a degree of similarity between two strings at high speed. Therefore, it accelerates processing for text retrieval in database, analysis of DNA, protein sequences in bioinformatics, and so on. I