alm to another, and when such a move requires bigger CAMs such as using 18Mb CAMs instead of 9Mb CAMs, he or she must find twice as many watts in a usually very limited power budget. Another dimension of the power consumption problem associated with CAMs is that consump- tion numbers as quoted in CAM vendors' web sites and white papers are not typically the worst-case ones. Therefore, designers are strongly advised to ask their CAM vendor early on in the component technology evaluation stage to confirm the worst-case numbers and what kind of offered load would generate the worst-case behavior. The power consumption problem in CAMs is much wider than what might appear at first glance. In our view, tackling it involves much more than simply sticking the undesirable label on the CAMs. Maintenance and table management is another area where the industry has been struggling with the ramifications of optimizing the usability of CAMs and minimizing the time to market with soft- ware, which can become extremely complicated and heavy at times. Some CAM products lack in this area, but others excel. For instance, the third port (Synchronous Maintenance Interface [SMI]) for SiberCore CAMs is an interesting way of having the control plane processor access the CAM out-of- band and modify the table boundaries without affecting the ongoing search processes. We also briefly mentioned the efforts of some vendors to provide sort-free CAMs, SO the partial truth in this reproach quickly evaporates. Some leading CAM vendors will end up being successful, whereas others who do not innovate and keep up with the industry will lose ground and ultimately lose business. Downloaded from Digital Engineering Library @ McGraw-Hill (www.digitalengineeringlibrary.com) Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies. All rights reserved. Any use is subject to the Terms of Use as given at the website. SEARCH ENGINES NETWORK PROCESSORS The density and footprint of CAMs have also been called a major issue by several quarters, but this is an unfair statement