Packet Forwarding Engine
Based on a new Ternary CAM architecture, each Ultra-2M device can hold 64K Layer 3 (IPv4) addresses - at least twice the capacity of the highest density competing CAM. Sixteen Ultra-2M's can be cascaded together to support over one million IPv4 addresses in a single routing sub-system, with no search throughput performance penalty. This memory density and wire-speed forwarding at OC-192 and OC-768 rates is critical to sustaining the exponential growth of the Internet.
These forwarding engines use a programmable search comparand input port and a fixed length pipelined architecture to deliver one search result per clock cycle for 36-, 72-, and 144- bit addresses and one search result per two clock cycles for 288-bit addresses. With clock speeds as high as 100 MHz, Ultra-2M devices can process over one hundred million packets per second.
This makes them ideal for multiple OC-192 and single OC-768 look-ups in terabit routers, as well as for multi-layer multi-protocol support in gigabit and 10 gigabit enterprise LAN switches.
The 32-bit Layer 3 IPv4 addresses are likely to predominate in the near term, but will be interspersed with 128-bit IPv6 addresses. The Ultra-2M is the only ternary CAM-based solution that permits each entry to be dynamically and individually tagged as either 36-, 72-, 144- or 288-bits wide to support multiple types of look-ups within the same chip without restriction as to the ratio of the entry types. This capability ensures that the entire memory is fully utilized.
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