Intel Agilex® 7 F-Series and I-Series FPGA Memory Subsystem IP User Guide

ID 789389
Date 12/04/2023
Public

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Document Table of Contents

3.2.2. Memory Subsystem TCAM

The multi-slice TCAM (MS-TCAM) search IP provides a fabric-based bit-maskable search function that accepts a stream of search keys and outputs a corresponding stream of results, with each result providing an indication of whether the key matches an entry in the current database, plus the ID of any matching entry. Optionally, it can also output a bit vector reflecting all the matching entries for a given search key.

An AXI-Lite interface allows a CPU to insert, delete or flush (delete all) database entries, and also allows the CPU to search for a specific key. To insert an entry, the CPU must specify the entry ID, the key, a corresponding mask (indicating which key bits to check during a search) and an optional result field. If a key matches multiple entries during a search, the highest matching entry ID is output, along with the optional result field.

The masking is fully flexible – there are no limitations on the mask values or on the number of unique masks that can be used.

You can configure each TCAM with up to 4 core tables, which can make time-multiplexed requests to memory blocks. The TCAM can achieve up to 1 search-per-cycle using pipelined execution when it is configured with only 1 core table, when the TCAM is generated with more than 1 core table and the request rate is higher than the throughput, the pending requests are stored in a FIFO buffer.

The control part of the system accepts management requests to and from a CPU using the AXI-Lite registers and performs all necessary operations to process those requests. The management requests perform operations on the database such as flush, insert, delete, or search entries.

Figure 8. Ternary Content Addressable Memory (TCAM)