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Fast Regular Expression Matching using FPGAs (2001) [81 citations — 7 self]

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@INPROCEEDINGS{Sidhu01fastregular,
    author = {Reetinder Sidhu and Viktor K. Prasanna},
    title = {Fast Regular Expression Matching using FPGAs},
    booktitle = {in IEEE Symposium on Field-Programmable Custom Computing Machines},
    year = {2001}
}

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Abstract:

This paper presents an ecient method for nding matches to a given regular expression in given text using FPGAs. To match a regular expression of length n, a serial machine requires O(2 n ) memory and takes O(1) time per text character. The proposed approach requires only O(n 2 ) space and still processes a text character in O(1) time (one clock cycle). The improvement is due to the Nondeterministic Finite Automaton (NFA) used to perform the matching. As far as the authors are aware, this is the rst practical use of a nondeterministic state machine on programmable logic. Furthermore, the paper presents a simple, fast algorithm that quickly constructs the NFA for the given regular expression. Fast NFA construction is crucial because the NFA structure depends on the regular expression, which is known only at runtime. Implementations of the algorithm for conventional FPGAs and the Self-Recongurable Gate Array (SRGA) are described. To evaluate performance, the NFA logic was mapped onto the Virtex XCV100 FPGA and the SRGA. Also, the performance of GNU grep for matching regular expressions was evaluated on an 800 MHz Pentium III machine. The proposed approach was faster than best case grep performance in most cases. It was orders of magnitude faster than worst case grep performance. Logic for the largest NFA considered t in less than a 1000 CLBs while DFA storage for grep in the worst case consumed a few hundred megabytes. 1

Citations

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2	State machine design techniques for Verilog and VHDL – Golson - 1994