Optical comb source for content-addressable memory encoders
AssigneeHewlett Packard Enterprise Development LP
InventorsMir Ashkan Seyedi, Thomas Van Vaerenbergh, Antoine Descos
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Abstract
One embodiment provides an optical encoder. The optical encoder includes an optical comb source to generate a multi-wavelength optical signal; a number of optical filters sequentially coupled to the optical comb source, with a respective optical filter being tunable to pass or block a particular wavelength of the multi-wavelength optical signal based on a corresponding bit value of a multi-bit search word; and a common output for the optical filters to output the filtered multi-wavelength optical signal, which encodes the multi-bit search word and can be used as an optical search signal for searching an optical content-addressable memory (CAM).
Claims20
An optical encoder, comprising:
- an optical comb source to generate a multi-wavelength optical signal;
- a number of optical filters sequentially coupled to the optical comb source, wherein a respective optical filter is tunable to pass or block a particular wavelength of the multi-wavelength optical signal based on a corresponding bit value of a multi-bit search word;
- and
- a common output for the optical filters to output the filtered multi-wavelength optical signal, which encodes the multi-bit search word and can be used as an optical search signal for searching an optical content-addressable memory (CAM).
An optical content-addressable memory (CAM) system, comprising:
- an optical memory bank comprising a plurality of optical CAM-cell arrays to store a plurality of words, wherein a respective optical CAM-cell array comprises a first set of sequentially coupled optical filters, and wherein a respective bit value of a stored word corresponds to states of one or more corresponding optical filters;
- and
- a search signal generator to generate an optical search signal used for searching the optical memory bank based on a search word, wherein the search signal generator comprises:
- an optical comb source to generate a multi-wavelength optical signal;
- a second set of optical filters sequentially coupled to the optical comb source, wherein a respective optical filter in the second set is tunable to pass or block a particular wavelength of the multi-wavelength optical signal based on a corresponding bit value of the search word;
- and
- a common output for the second set of optical filters to output the filtered multi-wavelength optical signal as the optical search signal, which encodes the multi-bit search word.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.