Palo Alto Networks, Inc.

De Bao Vu

William Alan Roberson

Subramani Ganesh

Savitha Raghunath

Matthew Robert Rohm

Gyanesh Saharia

To use larger capacity TCAMs while avoiding various packaging and power management issues of TCAMs, pre-processing can be performed on TCAM lookup requests to intelligently pipeline lookup requests according to a defined power budget that is based on TCAM and power supply specifications. Dividing lookup requests based on a power budget smooths the instantaneous current demand and dynamic power demand. This intelligent pre-processing of lookup requests allows lookup requests that satisfy a power budget based threshold to still complete within a single clock cycle while nominally reducing performance for those lookup requests that would not satisfy the power budget based threshold. When a lookup request will not satisfy the power budget based threshold, the lookup request is split into searches targeting different memory blocks of the TCAM.

Amortizing dissipated power and current demand in a ternary content addressable memory

A security device includes a controller configured to determine a flow identifier and an event counter associated with a received data packet and a counter memory including multiple memory banks where each memory bank stores a partial counter value for one or more event counters. The counter memory is indexed by a counter identifier associated with the event counter. A memory controller selects a memory bank in the counter memory that was not the memory bank last selected and the partial counter value associated with the counter identifier in the selected memory bank is updated, the updated partial counter value being written back to the selected memory bank. In one embodiment, the partial counter value is updated and written back within the latency window of the memory bank last selected.

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De Bao Vu