 CAM technology and examine their merits. 5. NetLogic Microsystems white paper, "High-Performance Layer 3 Forwarding in CIDR." V. Jacobson and M. Karels, "Congestion Avoidance and Control," ACM SIGCOMM (1988): 314-329. 7. M. Allman, V. Paxson, and W. Stevens, "TCP Congestion Control," RFC 2581 (obsoletes RFC 2001), April 1999. 8. Linley Gwennap, "Is It Time for CAMs?" EE Times (June 3, 2002). This is also available online at www.eetimes.com/ story/OEG20020603S0011. 9. SiberCore Technologies white paper, "Classification and Forwarding Co-Processors Come of Age." Downloaded from Digital Engineering Library @ McGraw-Hil (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 SEARCH ENGINES CAMs have been accused for having "gargantuan" power consumption needs. Several industry players (both vendors and analysts) have played around with numbers like trial lawyers when com- paring older generation CAMs with the more recent chips in order to show that the power consump- tion of CAM increases. Most of these comparisons do not help systems designers because comparing the power consumption between an older 2Mb CAM clocked at 66 MHz and capable of 66 Msps with a more recent 9Mb CAM that is clocked at 150 MHz and capable of 125 Msps does not make any sense in relative terms. The issue is much more complicated as power consumption in a CAM is a combined result from multiple and unrelated factors such as the specific semiconductor manufacturing process, the number of searches per second the CAM is called to execute, and the storage density. All these factors come into play in a not-so-obvious set of ways. For example, the smaller the process geometry, the larger the storage capacity. This can cause a drop in the power supply and even an increase in the clock fre- quency. No wonder CAM vendors have been moving continuously to smaller line widths. 0.25 processes were replaced by 0.18u processes. Those were