Efficient Hardware Search Engine for Associative Content Retrieval of Long Queries in Huge Multimedia Databases

Due to the enormous increase in the stored digital contents, search and retrieval functionalities are necessary in multimedia systems. Though processor speed for standard PCs (Personal Computers) is experiencing an almost exponential growth, the memory subsystem handicapped by lower frequencies and a physical I/O (Input/Output) limitation reflects the bottleneck of common computer architectures. As a result, many applications such as database management systems remain so dependent on memory throughput that increases in CPU (Central Processing Unit) speeds are no longer helpful. Because average bandwidth is crucial for system performance, our research has focused especially on techniques for efficient storage and retrieval of multimedia data. This paper presents the realization of a hardware database search engine based on an associative access method for textual information retrieval. It reveals the internal architecture of the system and compares the results of our hardware prototype with the software solution