Merging hardware and software: intellectual property cores for Internet applications

The Internet continuous growth and its widespread applications require different router architectures where flexibility and reconfigurability are the paradigms. In this scenario system engineers and designers ask for adequate and flexible solutions suitable both for prototypes and advanced products. This paper presents hard and soft Intellectual Property (IP) cores, parameterized and programmable for design reuse purposes, that can be efficiently used in address lookup units to forward Internet packet streams. The soft macro, IPCAM, is an innovative IP implementing a ternary Content Addressable Memory (CAM), which is capable of solving both exact and longest match operations; it is composed of a hardware module for fast search and a software module for search table configuration. The hard macro is a configurable and physical ternary CAM. Both are suitable for implementing a broad range of lookup functions. Moreover, the efficiency of the proposed cores have been proved on silicon and through a hardware emulation platform.