 in that front in the future. 10. SiberCore Technologies white paper, "Classification and Forwarding Co-Processors Come of Age." 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 SEARCH ENGINES GOING FORWARD The industry has been actively looking at ways of dramatically enhancing the performance of CAM technology. As we mentioned earlier, CAM vendors have announced plans to create parallel architec- tures that will enable multiple simultaneous lookups as a clever means of accelerating systems-level throughput. Figure 12.4 shows the dire need for such techniques as we move to higher-value QoS func- tionality (involving classification based on multiple fields from layers 4 to 7) and higher wire-speed platforms. One of the noteworthy new techniques that NetLogic has pioneered, which undoubtedly other ven- dors will want to emulate, is to produce sort-free CAMs. This technology purports to automatically manage the gaps between the table partitions SO the user does not have to worry about reshuffling the entries. This will lead to streamlined performance and easier table-management-related development software. Having the ability to restructure the various databases held inside the CAM as lookup tables that can be searched with various key lengths is important; therefore, it is currently one of the major areas of intensive academic and industrial research. For example, designers want to be able to partition the CAM array in 16 databases that can be searched each with a different key that can be anywhere from 36 bits all the way to 576 bits long. Power management is a real issue for CAMs, and the next generation of CAMs that are denser, deeper, and faster will obviously have to have advanced power-management features in order to ensure their market viability. One of the areas of continuing development is trying to devise an improved, 