CONCURRENT SEARCHING OF DIFFERENT TABLES WITHIN A CONTENT ADDRESSABLE MEMORY

摘要

A method and apparatus is described for the filtering of a common input string (405) to generate various filtered comparand strings. The filtering of a common input string enables concurrent lookups in different tables to be performed on multiple filtered comparands by different CAM devices (or different blocks (410-414) within a CAM device (400)), to compare the data in the filtered comparand strings with data stored in its associative memory. By performing multiple lookups in parallel, rather than sequentially, packet throughput in a CAM may be significantly increased.