Adaptable High Performance Packet Engine Design

Supported by the Ministry of Knowledge Economy in Korea, a packet processing engine with a hardware accelerator was researched for processing agent packets rapidly. In particular, AntNet, which is agent-based adaptive routing algorithm, was supported in the packet engine. Additionally, both the modified reduced instruction set processor and content addressable memory were implemented in order to support unique instructions for packet processing. By adopting the high-level design flow based on LISA language, both the hardware description and software tool chain were obtained; the packet engine was verified with test chips fabricated in an 180nm processor and evaluation systems.