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IEICE Transactions on Electronics 2005 E88-C(6):1332-1342; doi:10.1093/ietele/e88-c.6.1332
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Copyright © 2005 The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers

Regular Section -- Papers -- Integrated Electronics

A CAM-Based Signature-Matching Co-processor with Application-Driven Power-Reduction Features

Kazunari INOUE1, Hideyuki NODA1, Kazutami ARIMOTO1, HANS Jürgen MATTAUSCH2 and Tetsushi KOIDE2

1 The authors are with Custom LSI Business unit, Custom LSI Design Dept. 1, Renesas Technology Corporation, Itami-shi, 664-0005 Japan. E-mail: inoue.kazunari{at}renesas.com, 2 The authors are with Research Center for Nanodevices and Systems, Hiroshima University, Higashihiroshima-shi, 739-8527 Japan.

A signature-matching co-processor in 130 nm CMOS technology for application in the network-security field is presented. Two key search technologies, implemented with fully-parallel CAM-based search cores, enable the removal of misused packets from Giga-bit-per-second (G-bps) networks in real-time without disturbing the normal network traffic. The first technology is a thorough search through packet header as well as payload in byte-shifting manner and is capable of detecting viruses, even if they are hidden at an arbitrary position within the packet. A 1.125 Mbit ternary CAM, operated at the speed of 125 Mega-searches per second (M-sps), integrates the primary lookup table for thorough packet search. The second technology applies an additional relational search with programmable logical operations to detect recently appearing more complicated misused packets. A small 192-bit binary CAM operated at 31.25 M-sps is also included for this purpose. Power dissipation, being a major concern of CAM-based application-specific LSIs, is addressed in the light of the signature-matching application, which has a high probability of multiple matches and which doesn't require to mask individual bits of the search word. Consequently, two application-driven power-reduction methods are implemented, namely an improved pipelined search for efficiently reducing power even in the case of a large number of multiple matches, and a search-line encoding for cutting search-line related power dissipation. As a result the signature-matching co-processor features low power dissipation between 0.4 W and 1.1 W for the best case and the worst case search configurations, respectively.

Key Words: CAM, TCAM, signature-matching, network security

Manuscript received September 8, 2004. Manuscript revised January 19, 2005.


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