A Flexible Design of Network Devices Using ‎Reconfigurable Content Addressable Memory ‎

The content addressable memory is a memory unit that uses content matching instead of addresses. content addressable ‎memory are used in different networking, telecommunications and storage applications because of their parallel, fast search ‎capabilities. This paper presents a new method (called array method) for designing Reconfigurable Content Addressable ‎Memory (RCAM). The behavior of the new method was described using VHDL and implemented using FPGA technique. Then, ‎the performance of the method was compared to other traditional content addressable memory design methods. The proposed ‎RCAM is configured and used as the main part of different network‏ ‏security devices and units (ethernet address filtering unit, ‎WLAN MAC address filtering unit ,firewall on chip, QoS packet classification unit, routing table search unit and network ‎intrusion detection system search unit). The successful implementations of the suggested RCAM prove its high flexibility to be ‎used in different network applications.