Search Results (10)

Content Addressable Memories (CAMs) are pivotal in high-speed packet processing systems, enabling rapid data lookup operations essential for applications such as routing, switching, and network security. While traditional Register-Transfer Level (RTL) methodologies have been extensively used to implement CAM architectures on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), they often involve complex, time-consuming design processes with limited flexibility. In this paper, we propose a novel templated High-Level Synthesis (HLS)-based approach for the design and implementation of CAM architectures such as Binary CAMs (BCAMs) and Ternary CAMs (TCAMs) optimized for data plane packet processing. Our HLS-based methodology leverages the parallel processing capabilities of FPGAs through employing various design parameters and optimization directives while significantly reducing development time and enhancing design portability. This paper also presents architectural design and optimization strategies to offer a fine-tuned CAM solution for networking-related arbitrary use cases. Experimental results demonstrate that HLSCAM achieves a high throughput, reaching up to 31.18 Gbps, 9.04 Gbps, and 33.04 Gbps in the $256\times 128$, $512\times 36$, and $1024\times 150$ CAM sizes, making it a competitive solution for high-speed packet processing on FPGAs. Full article

A soil removal device for the root-soil complex of Gentian imitating the percussion function of a woodpecker was designed to improve the soil removal efficiency of harvesting devices for rhizome-type traditional Chinese herbal medicines. Based on the physical parameters of roots and the root-soil complex of Gentian, the structure parameters of the striking arm and the actual profile of the cam are determined according to the physical parameters when the woodpecker knocks on the tree. The key parameters that affect the working performance of the soil removal device and their suitable value ranges have been identified through the impact test and analysis of the root-soil complex of Gentian. The mass of the striking hammer, the swing angle of the striking arm, and the rotation speed of the cam were taken as the experimental factors and the soil removal rate and the energy consumption per hammer percussion were taken as the experimental indicators. The ternary quadratic orthogonal regression combination experiment was carried out using Design-Expert. The regression model of the influence factors and evaluation indicators was established through the analysis of variance. The interaction effects of the influence factors on the indicators were analyzed using the response surface method. Using multiobjective optimization method, the optimal parameter combination was obtained as that of the mass of the striking hammer of 0.9 kg, the swing angle of the striking arm of 47°, and the rotation speed of the cam of 100 r/min, then the soil removal rate was the maximum and the energy consumption of single-hammer knocking was the minimum, with the values of 89.12% and 31.21 J, respectively. This study can provide a reference for the design and optimization of soil removal devices for rhizome-type traditional Chinese herbal medicines. Full article

Content-addressable memory (CAM) has been part of the memory market for more than five decades. CAM can carry out a single clock cycle lookup based on the content rather than an address. Thanks to this attractive feature, CAM is utilized in memory systems where a high-speed content lookup technique is required. However, typical CAM applications only support exact matching, as opposed to approximate matching, where a certain Hamming distance (several mismatching characters between a query pattern and the dataset stored in CAM) needs to be tolerated. Recent interest in approximate search has led to the development of new CAM-based alternatives, accelerating the processing of large data workloads in the realm of big data, genomics, and other data-intensive applications. In this review, we provide an overview of approximate CAM and describe its current and potential applications that would benefit from approximate search computing. Full article

In-memory computing is an attractive solution for reducing power consumption and memory access latency cost by performing certain computations directly in memory without reading operands and sending them to arithmetic logic units. Content-addressable memory (CAM) is an ideal way to smooth out the distinction between storage and processing, since each memory cell is a processing unit. CAM compares the search input with a table of stored data and returns the matched data address. The issues of constructing binary and ternary content-addressable memory (CAM and TCAM) based on ferroelectric devices are considered. A review of ferroelectric materials and devices is carried out, including on ferroelectric transistors (FeFET), ferroelectric tunnel diodes (FTJ), and ferroelectric memristors. Full article

Content-addressable memory (CAM) performs a parallel search operation by comparing the search data with all content stored in memory during a single cycle, instead of finding the data using an address. Conventional CAM designs use a dynamic CMOS architecture for high matching speed and high density; however, such implementations require the use of system clocks, and thus, suffer from timing violations and design limitations, such as charge sharing. In this paper, we propose a static-based architecture for a low-power, high-speed binary CAM (BCAM) and ternary CAM (TCAM), using a nanoelectromechanical (NEM) memory switch for nonvolatile data storage. We designed the proposed CAM architectures on a 65 nm process node with a 1.2 V operating voltage. The results of the layout simulation show that the proposed design has up to 23% less propagation delay, three times less matching power, and 9.4 times less area than a conventional design. Full article

Co-amorphous drug delivery systems (CAMS) are characterized by the combination of two or more (initially crystalline) low molecular weight components that form a homogeneous single-phase amorphous system. Over the past decades, CAMS have been widely investigated as a promising approach to address the challenge of low water solubility of many active pharmaceutical ingredients. Most of the studies on CAMS were performed on a case-by-case basis, and only a few systematic studies are available. A quantitative analysis of the literature on CAMS under certain aspects highlights not only which aspects have been of great interest, but also which future developments are necessary to expand this research field. This review provides a comprehensive updated overview on the current published work on CAMS using a quantitative approach, focusing on three critical quality attributes of CAMS, i.e., co-formability, physical stability, and dissolution performance. Specifically, co-formability, molar ratio of drug and co-former, preparation methods, physical stability, and in vitro and in vivo performance were covered. For each aspect, a quantitative assessment on the current status was performed, allowing both recent advances and remaining research gaps to be identified. Furthermore, novel research aspects such as the design of ternary CAMS are discussed. Full article

The bacterial species Neisseria gonorrhoeae (N. gonorrhoeae) and Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus) are amongst the main microorganisms that cause ophthalmia neonatorum. The current treatment involves the use of various antibiotics such as ciprofloxacin, cephalosporin, ceftriaxone and cefotaxime. However, this treatment strategy is becoming more ineffective due to the antibiotic resistance in N. gonorrhoeae. The current study explores the potential use of fatty acid based microemulsions (ME) to prevent N. gonorrhoeae and S. aureus infections in new-borns’ eyes without harmful side effects such as corneal or conjunctiva irritation. Pseudo-ternary phase diagrams were constructed to evaluate microemulsion regions and six different α-linolenic acid based microemulsions were prepared. The prepared formulations were characterized for α-linolenic acid content, size, transparency, zeta potential, Polarized light Microscopy, antimicrobial activity and ex vivo ocular toxicity. The mean droplet size of the ME formulations was in the range of 190.4 to 350.5 nm and polydispersity index (PDI) values were in the range of 0.102 to 0.561. All formulations were found stable upon storage for at least 8 weeks. In addition, self-diffusion coefficients determined by nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) reflected that the diffusability of water increased at higher than 30% w/w water, while that of fatty acids and surfactants was in reverse. The antimicrobial efficacy of microemulsions was determined against N. gonorrhoeae and S. aureus. It was concluded that all microemulsions have strong antimicrobial effects against N. gonorrhoeae and S. aureus. Finally, bovine corneal opacity permeability (BCOP) and hen’s egg chorioallantoic (HET-CAM) tests results showed that all microemulsion formulations were not strong ocular irritants. Full article

Calmodulin (CaM) and phosphatidylinositide-3 kinase (PI3Kα) are well known for their multiple roles in a series of intracellular signaling pathways and in the progression of several human cancers. Crosstalk between CaM and PI3Kα has been an area of intensive research. Recent experiments have shown that in adenocarcinoma, K-Ras4B is involved in the CaM-PI3Kα crosstalk. Based on experimental results, we have recently put forward a hypothesis that the coordination of CaM and PI3Kα with K-Ras4B forms a CaM-PI3Kα-K-Ras4B ternary complex, which leads to the formation of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma. However, the mechanism for the CaM-PI3Kα crosstalk is unresolved. Based on molecular modeling and molecular dynamics simulations, here we explored the potential interactions between CaM and the c/nSH2 domains of p85α subunit of PI3Kα. We demonstrated that CaM can interact with the c/nSH2 domains and the interaction details were unraveled. Moreover, the possible modes for the CaM-cSH2 and CaM-nSH2 interactions were uncovered and we used them to construct a complete CaM-PI3Kα complex model. The structural model of CaM-PI3Kα interaction not only offers a support for our previous ternary complex hypothesis, but also is useful for drug design targeted at CaM-PI3Kα protein-protein interactions. Full article

Cross-domain ground-based cloud classification is a challenging issue as the appearance of cloud images from different cloud databases possesses extreme variations. Two fundamental problems which are essential for cross-domain ground-based cloud classification are feature representation and similarity measurement. In this paper, we propose an effective feature representation called transfer of local features (TLF), and measurement method called discriminative metric learning (DML). The TLF is a generalized representation framework that can integrate various kinds of local features, e.g., local binary patterns (LBP), local ternary patterns (LTP) and completed LBP (CLBP). In order to handle domain shift, such as variations of illumination, image resolution, capturing location, occlusion and so on, the TLF mines the maximum response in regions to make a stable representation for domain variations. We also propose to learn a discriminant metric, simultaneously. We make use of sample pairs and the relationship among cloud classes to learn the distance metric. Furthermore, in order to improve the practicability of the proposed method, we replace the original cloud images with the convolutional activation maps which are then applied to TLF and DML. The proposed method has been validated on three cloud databases which are collected in China alone, provided by Chinese Academy of Meteorological Sciences (CAMS), Meteorological Observation Centre (MOC), and Institute of Atmospheric Physics (IAP). The classification accuracies outperform the state-of-the-art methods. Full article

Electronic Content Addressable Memories (CAM) implement Address Look-Up (AL) table functionalities of network routers; however, they typically operate in the MHz regime, turning AL into a critical network bottleneck. In this communication, we demonstrate the first steps towards developing optical CAM alternatives to enable a re-engineering of AL memories. Firstly, we report on the photonic integration of Semiconductor Optical Amplifier-Mach Zehnder Interferometer (SOA-MZI)-based optical Flip-Flop and Random Access Memories on a monolithic InP platform, capable of storing the binary prefix-address data-bits and the outgoing port information for next hop routing, respectively. Subsequently the first optical Binary CAM cell (B-CAM) is experimentally demonstrated, comprising an InP Flip-Flop and a SOA-MZI Exclusive OR (XOR) gate for fast search operations through an XOR-based bit comparison, yielding an error-free 10 Gb/s operation. This is later extended via physical layer simulations in an optical Ternary-CAM (T-CAM) cell and a 4-bit Matchline (ML) configuration, supporting a third state of the “logical X” value towards wildcard bits of network subnet masks. The proposed functional CAM and Random Access Memories (RAM) sub-circuits may facilitate light-based Address Look-Up tables supporting search operations at 10 Gb/s and beyond, paving the way towards minimizing the disparity with the frantic optical transmission linerates, and fast re-configurability through multiple simultaneous Wavelength Division Multiplexed (WDM) memory access requests. Full article