A reconfigurable array based prototype of a specialised string lookup chip

Different strategies for performing string lookups have been developed and deployed during the evolutionary scientific process. These are the results of both the development of technology and the need for improvement of previously existing solutions. Hence, the string lookup problem has been well studied and the respectful amount of good solutions is present. Due to nature of the problem, most of the solutions are software based. Nevertheless, in the modern computing environments, in which the amount of data to be searched trough is increasingly growing, the problem re-arises demanding for the different type of approaches that could target multi-gigabit throughput rates so as to perform close to real-time string lookups. In that light, this paper studies the potential of migrating, a well-known and widely used, Boyer-Moore string lookup algorithm to a hardware specific device capable of satisfying the demanded throughput, by proposing and characterising the initial implementation option on a reconfigurable platform.