| 摘要 |
The invention provides a method and system for lookup (Fig. 2) of message header information that has the advantages of low-power, speed, and flexibility. The invention uses a sequence of pipelined on-chip memories, each having on a portion of the header information intended for lookup. Each one of the on-chip memories simultaneously performs a lookup on a portion of the header information, allowing embodiments of the invention to operate on multiple messages worth of header information substantially simultaneously. The invention uses a novel data structure for recording destination addresses in the sequence of on-chip memories (130), having the property that moving information about destination addresses, or otherwise responding to changes in network topology is flexible, while at the same time maintaining a relatively dense usage of the on-chip memories. The novel data structure allows embodiments of the invention to find the longest match destination address with no substantial additional processing over random-access memory lookup. |
