FSA EXTENSION ARCHITECTURE FOR PROGRAMMABLE INTELLIGENT SEARCH MEMORY

摘要

Memory architecture provides capabilities for high performance content search. The architecture creates an innovative memory that can be programmed with content search rules which are used by the memory to evaluate presented content for matching with the programmed rules. When the content being searched matches any of the rules programmed in the Programmable Intelligent Search Memory (PRISM) action(s) associated with the matched rule(s) are taken. Content search rules comprise of regular expressions which are converted to finite state automata (FSA) and then programmed in PRISM for evaluating content with the search rules. PRISM architecture comprises of a plurality of programmable PRISM Search Engines (PSE), each capable of supporting a predetermined size FSAs. FSA extension architecture is created to extend the predetermined size limit of an FSA supported by PSE, by coupling multiple PSEs together to behave as a composite PSE to support larger FSAs.