An investigation on multiport memory and tcam architectures in fpga for performance enhancement

Abstract

Multiport and Ternary Content Addressable Memory (TCAM) are used in networking applications, typically packet forwarding mechanisms. The traditional memory architectures comprise single port or dual port and can perform one or two operations simultaneously. However, multiport memory becomes necessary in systems with multiple processors requiring simultaneous memory access without conflicts. Multiport memory has several independent ports, each capable of performing read and write operations concurrently. Each port has its own set of addresses and data lines, allowing multiple processors to access different locations in memory simultaneously. TCAM is a high speed searching device that searches the entire memory parallelly in a single cycle. However, modern Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) do not have a built in TCAM and multiport memory, so they must be emulated using Block RAMs (BRAM) and Static Random Access Memory (SRAM) such as Lookup Table (LUT), LUTRAM and Flip Flops (FF). The emulation of TCAMs on FPGAs can significantly impact performance. Therefore, it is important to carefully consider the trade offs involved before deciding to emulate TCAMs on an FPGA. Hence, this research mainly focuses on developing a multiport memory and TCAM architecture to enhance the performance parameters such as throughput, slice utilization, power consumption and energy efficiency. The combination of multiport and TCAM can be used to create high performance systems that can handle large amounts of data quickly. newline