Regular expression memory region with integrated regular expression engine

Abstract

A method and circuit arrangement selectively perform regular expression matching in connection with accessing data with a processing unit based upon one or more regular expression matching-related attributes stored in a memory address translation data structure such as an Effective To Real Translation (ERAT) or Translation Lookaside Buffer (TLB). A regular expression matching-related attribute in such a data structure may be used to control whether data being communicated between the processing unit and a communications bus is routed through an expression engine integrated with the processing unit such that regular expression matching may be performed in association with the data communication.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.