US 10,504,595 B1 · Amortizing dissipated power and current demand in a ternary content addressable memory

Abstract

To use larger capacity TCAMs while avoiding various packaging and power management issues of TCAMs, pre-processing can be performed on TCAM lookup requests to intelligently pipeline lookup requests according to a defined power budget that is based on TCAM and power supply specifications. Dividing lookup requests based on a power budget smooths the instantaneous current demand and dynamic power demand. This intelligent pre-processing of lookup requests allows lookup requests that satisfy a power budget based threshold to still complete within a single clock cycle while nominally reducing performance for those lookup requests that would not satisfy the power budget based threshold. When a lookup request will not satisfy the power budget based threshold, the lookup request is split into searches targeting different memory blocks of the TCAM.

Claims20

Dependent claims

A method comprising:

estimating a number of hits in a first ternary content addressable memory (TCAM) for a lookup key of a lookup request on the first TCAM;
determining whether the number of hits satisfies a first threshold, wherein the first threshold corresponds to a lookup power budget for the first TCAM;
based on a determination that the estimated number of hits satisfies the first threshold, splitting the lookup request into a plurality of lookup requests that each targets different sets of one or more memory blocks of the first TCAM;
and
pipelining the plurality of lookup requests to a storage component of the first TCAM, wherein the storage component includes the memory blocks.

2 more elements

A ternary content addressable memory (TCAM) comprising:

ternary storage comprising a plurality of memory blocks and peripheral circuitry for accessing the memory blocks;
and
a TCAM controller configured to,
estimate whether lookup for a key in the ternary storage according to a received lookup request will conform to a power budget for a lookup on the TCAM;
and
based on a determination that lookup for the key in the ternary storage according to the received lookup request will not conform to a power budget, enable different sets of the plurality of memory blocks over multiple clock cycles and submit the key for lookup to the ternary storage for each enabled set of the plurality of memory blocks.

3 more elements

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.

Amortizing dissipated power and current demand in a ternary content addressable memory

Life of this patent

Amortizing dissipated power and current demand in a ternary content addressable memory

Life of this patent

Abstract

Claims20