A new reconfigurable hardware architecture for high throughput networking applications and its design methodology

Recent efforts to add new services to the Internet have increased the interest in designing flexible routers that are easy to extend and evolve. This paper describes a new hardware architecture based on dynamic reconfigurable logic (DRL) for high throughput networking applications. It mainly focuses on the content-based router and on how to schedule efficiently its computation time. This scheduling task is difficult because of the various features of the underlying hardware such as multicontext, control-data path architecture and memory interface. Experimental results show some improvements over most recent network processors as well as a better hardware synthesis methodology.