In addition, those extra bits exact a trade-off, he said. The problem is the penalty of having those extra bits for each location, which gives you a bigger die. IDT has enhanced its new line of CAM chips with added logic for functions such as table maintenance. Sizes of the resulting coprocessors will range from 32,000 to 128,000 entries of 72 bits each, giving the largest device a capacity of roughly 9 Mbits. A 288-bit search is also available, at half the speed.
All devices are due to sample in the third quarter.
One problem dogging search engines is the lack of standards for the interface between a CAM and a network processor. Normally, an FPGA is used as glue logic in this spot. Sometimes Xilinx and Altera are the big winners here. A similar deal is in the works with Vitesse, he said. A Network Processor Forum interface for the search engine isn't likely to come soon, he said.