Patent ID: 7350019

Claim:
A CAM device comprising: a CAM array including a plurality of physical banks; a logical bank-physical bank converter for setting an assignment between logical banks and physical banks, and for outputting a control signal to set a configuration of one or more physical banks assigned to a logical bank to be searched, depending on a logical bank signal indicating the logical bank to be searched; a priority circuit; and a cascade circuit, wherein in searching one of hit entries and empty entries, i) if the CAM device includes one or more physical banks assigned to the logical bank to be searched: the logical bank-physical bank converter outputs a search control signal to the one or more physical banks so that each of the one or more physical banks output a search result to the priority circuit; and the priority circuit outputs a search result of the CAM device depending on the search result output from each of the one or more physical banks to the cascade circuit; and ii) if the CAM device includes no physical bank assigned to the logical bank to be searched; the logical bank-physical bank converter outputs a signal directly to the cascade circuit to inform that there is no physical bank assigned to the logical bank so that the cascade circuit generates one of a signal indicating that there is no hit entry in the CAM device and a signal indicating that there is no empty entry in the CAM device as a search result of the CAM device; and the cascade circuit performs a logical operation on the search result of the CAM device and a search result supplied from a higher order CAM device, and transmits a result of the logical operation to a lower order CAM device.