PETCAM—A Power Efficient TCAM Architecture for Forwarding Tables

Ternary Content Addressable Memory (TCAM) is a hardware device which can support high-speed table lookups and is an attractive solution for applications such as packet forwarding and classification. We investigate various TCAM architectures recently proposed for TCAM power and memory reduction in packet forwarding and show that far better power and memory performance is possible when we use an optimal prefix set for the given routing table. Compared to existing approaches, our experimental results demonstrate that our approach can significantly reduce both power (8-98 percent) and TCAM memory (45-78 percent) requirements.