37943

This high-speed, high-capacity Search Engine can be deployed in a variety of networking and communications applications. The performance and features of the M7040N make it attractive in applications such as Enterprise LAN switches and routers and broadband switching and/or routing equipment supporting multiple data rates at OC48 and beyond. The Search Engine is designed to be scalable in order to support network database sizes to 3968K entries specifically for environments that require large network policy databases.

Figure 4, page 5 shows the block diagram for the M7040N device.

ST Microelectronics, Inc.'s 37943 Search Engine incorporates patent-pending Associative Processing Technology™ (APT) and is designed to be a high-performance, pipelined, synchronous, 64K-entry network database search engine. The M7040N database entry size can be 72 bits, 144 bits, or 288 bits. In the 72-bit entry mode, the size of the database is 64K entries. In the 144-bit mode, the size of the database is 32K entries, and in the 288-bit mode, the size of the database is 16K entries. The 37943 is configurable to support multiple databases with different entry sizes.

The 36-bit entry table can be implemented using the Global Mask Registers (GMRs) building-database size of 128K entries with a single device.