METHOD AND DEVICE FOR HIGH PERFORMANCE REGULAR EXPRESSION PATTERN MATCHING

摘要

Disclosed herein is an improved architecture for regular expression pattern matching. Improvements to pattern matching deterministic finite automatons (DFAs) that are described by the inventors include a pipelining strategy that pushes state-dependent feedback to a final pipeline stage to thereby enhance parallelism and throughput, augmented state transitions that track whether a transition is indicative of a pattern match occurring thereby reducing the number of necessary states for the DFA, augmented state transition that track whether a transition is indicative of a restart to the matching process, compression of the DFA's transition table, alphabet encoding for input symbols to equivalence class identifiers, the use of an indirection table to allow for optimized transition table memory, and enhanced scalability to facilitate the ability of the improved DFA to process multiple input symbols per cycle.