BPR-TCAM--Block and partial reconfiguration based TCAM on Xilinx FPGAs

Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) based Ternary Content Addressable Memories (TCAMs) are widely used in high-speed networking applications.However, TCAMs are not present on state-of-the-art FPGAs and need to be emulated on SRAM-based memories (i.e., LUTRAMs and Block RAMs) which requires a large amount of FPGA resources. In this paper, we present an efficient methodology to implement FPGA-based TCAMs with significant resource savings compared to existing schemes. The proposed methodology exploits the fracturable nature of Look Up Tables (LUTs) and the built-in slice carry-chains for simultaneous mapping of two rules and its matching logic to a single FPGA slice. Multiple slices can be stacked together to build deeper and wider TCAMs in a modular way. The combination of all these techniques results in significant savings in resource utilization compared to existing approaches.Pedro Reviriego would like to acknowledge the support of the TEXEO project TEC2016-80339-R funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitivity and of the Madrid Community research project TAPIR-CM grant no. P2018/TCS-4496