DSCAM: Latency-Guaranteed and High-Capacity Content-Addressable Memory on FPGAs

Abstract

This letter introduces an original and highly efficient method to implement high-capacity content-addressable memories on field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). The method includes a new hardware architecture and an optimization technique to determine crucial design parameters. The memory contents are partially synthesized and implemented on FPGA logic fabrics. The proposed architecture offers high throughput and fixed-latency searches. Experimental results show that the proposed method enables the implementation of an IPv4 forwarding table with over 520 K prefixes on a cost-effective AMD-Xilinx UltraScale + FPGA, providing a lookup latency of less than 28 ns and a minimum throughput of 215 million lookups per second. The source code of this work is available on GitHub.