Low Power TCAMs For Very Large Forwarding Tables

Abstract—Ternary content-addressable memories (TCAMs) may be used to obtain a simple and very fast implementation of a router’s forwarding engine. The applicability of TCAMs is, however, limited by their size and high power requirement. Zane et al. [1] proposed a method and associated algorithms to reduce the power needed to search a forwarding table using a TCAM. We improve on both the algorithms proposed by them. Additionally, we show how to couple TCAMs and high bandwidth SRAMs so as to overcome both the power and size limitations of a pure TCAM forwarding engine. I