Multi-Stage TCAMs Architecture for IP Lookup

Abstract

Ternary Content Addressable Memory (TCAM)-based forwarding engines are widely used in core routers to achieve high throughput. To increase the throughput and reduce the power consumption of TCAM we propose a pipeline forwarding engine with multiple TCAMs, called Multi-stage TCAMs. Multi-stage TCAMs can perform IP lookups in parallel. A stream of IP lookup requests can be issued into multi-stage TCAMs, one every cycle, to achieve high throughput and reduce the power consumption.