Cavium Debuts New NEURON Search Processors

Cavium, a provider of highly integrated semiconductor products, unveiled its new NEURON Search processor family built with breakthrough search technology that can deliver 4x higher capacity. The new family includes NEURON Search and NEURONMAX Search product lines with support for both IPv4 and IPv6 rules.

The Search processors are capable of delivering 100 million to over 1.6 billion searches per second with guaranteed low latency and are targeted at search apps in enterprise and service provider infrastructure equipment.

Cavium claimed that it has employed a completely different approach and developed breakthrough search technology using a range of mathematical and neural pattern recognition concepts that remove many of the critical constraints. Its search technology sets the bar for silicon efficiency doubling the number of rules that can be stored per unit area which results in lower power consumption and cost. Lower costs are expected to drive the wider adoption of the search technology.

The NEURON Search Processor (News - Alert) CNSP1XXX product line offers 100 million to 1.6 billion searches per second with enough capacity in a single chip to replace four of the highest density 40 Mb TCAM parts. The NEUROMAX CNSP2XXX line on the other hand can expand the rule capacity through external DDR3 memory to 20x of the NEURON Search Processor family while retaining footprint compatibility.

Officials with the company remarked that compared with TCAMs currently in production, the NEURON Search Processor quadruples the capacity while the NEURONMAX Search family extends the capacity further. System designers will appreciate the lower power of these devices as well as having another established supplier of search processors.

Both the processor lines are expected to be available in the first quarter of 2012 and product SDK comes packed with compiler, simulator and real-time rule update manager.