Tag matching mechanism and method and computing system for using thereof

Abstract

The present invention provides a hardware-based tag matching mechanism that may include a cyclic buffer with segments arranged by age, each segment containing tag entries storing tagging patterns. The mechanism may further include an appendage buffer, configured to store tagging patterns evicted from the cyclic buffer. A lookup engine may match incoming data blocks against stored tagging patterns, searching appendage buffer entries first, then cyclic buffer segments from oldest to newest. A control circuit may be adapted to evict tag entries from the current oldest cyclic buffer segment to the appendage buffer, then rotates the cyclic buffer to redefine the oldest segment. A memory access manager may calculate a target address of a memory device based on an index of a located tag entry and may access the memory device at the target address to retrieve or write data corresponding to the incoming data packet, thereby facilitating content-addressable memory operations.