 then replaced by 0.15u processes, which are now being replaced by 0.13u. The 90 nm realm is on the horizon for CAMs as it is already in use for other semiconductor products. Since power supplies are lower for each new smaller line-width process, CAMs that are built with 0.18u processes exhibited almost 50 percent less power consump- tion than their 0.25 predecessors for the same search rate and clock speed. A 30 percent further improvement occurred with the subsequent movement to 0.15u. Meanwhile, more megabits of stored information can be packed onto the same silicon die and more searches per second can be initiated thanks to the higher clock rates. Older products cannot scale to these higher expectations, making these comparisons inappropriate. In any event, the normalized power consumption trend has consequently been pointing downward, if power consumption is to be looked at as watts per megabit. This achievement must be credited to the CAM vendors who have worked hard to make their products more efficient. From a systems architect's point of view, however, the real issue of power consumption is the absolute value in watts, not the relative value of watts per megabit. Even if vendors with advanced CAM technology can provide the welcome and spectacular performance of 0.95 watts per megabit in their chips, the search engine system's power consumption evil does not lie with the CAM. It lies with the evolving applications themselves, which require that larger tables be stored for lookup and clas- sification based on their consultation and that this continues to happen at wire speed. This is what drives the quest for an increase in CAM size. Therefore, power consumption is a necessary by-product of the issue, or as the cardinal technology law stipulates, this is the price to pay for the luxury of more elaborate classification that continuously needs more powerful search capabilities of larger knowl- edge bases. The systems designer then has to tackle the following power consumption problem. When moving from one re