Patent ID: 6892237

Claim:
A pattern matching engine for use in searching network messages for pre-defined regular expressions and for determining matches thereto, the pattern matching engine comprising; a regular expression storage device for storing the pre-defined regular expressions and one or more corresponding actions that are to be applied to network messages matching the respective regular expressions, the storage device including a content-addressable memory (CAM) having a plurality of entries containing at least the pre-defined regular expressions; and a decoder circuit coupled to the regular expression storage device, the decoder circuit configured to control an input to the CAM that includes a given network message or selected portion thereof for comparison with the regular expressions contained within the CAM, and to receive and decode an output returned from the regular expression storage device, the output identifying the action to be applied to the given network message or portion thereof, whereby the CAM is configured such that each network message, or portion thereof input to the CAM is compared against all CAM entries at the same time, allowing high-speed pattern matching of network messages.