ReCPU: a parallel and pipelined architecture for regular expression matching

Text pattern matching is one of the main and most computation intensive parts of systems such as Network Intrusion Detection Systems and DNA Sequencing Matching. Software solutions to this are available but often they do not satisfy the requirements in terms of performance. This paper presents a new hardware approach for regular expression matching: ReCPU. The proposed solution is a parallel and pipelined architecture able to deal with the common regular expression semantics. This implementation based on several parallel units achieves a throughput of more than one character per clock cycle (maximum performance of state of the art solutions) requiring just O(n) memory locations (where n is the length of the regular expression). Performance has been evaluated synthesizing the VHDL description. Area and time constraints have been analyzed. Experimental results are obtained simulating the architecture.