Titan IC Systems, a company that works in the regular expression for content processing, today announced that, together with Altera (News - Alert) Corporation, it found a flexible, high-performance solution for content processing for next-generation high-speed networks.

 

Both companies worked together for several months to optimize Titan’s “Regular Expression Processor (News - Alert)” to leverage the high-performance capability of Altera Stratix series FPGAs, officials say.

 

A field-programmable gate array is a semiconductor device comprising of programmable logic components called “logic blocks.” The logic blocks can be programmed to perform the function of basic logic gates such as AND, and XOR, or more typical functions such as decoders or mathematical functions, company officials say.

 

Godfrey Gaston, chief executive officer of Titan IC Systems, said that the finding is a very important milestone for Titan IC Systems, as the company now can offer a unique solution to the real, complex problem of performing true regular expression processing at 20Gb/s on an FPGA fabric.

 

According to Gaston, feedback has been overwhelming, as the solution is proving to be a capability meeting the performance requirements of the clients. Gaston said that support from Altera has played a key role in the development process.

 

The Regular Expression Processor by Novel makes the complex regular expression processing up to 20 gigabytes-per-second possible on an FPGA fabric, according to the company. To the customers, it means complete flexibility and high-performance for computationally intensive tasks, coupled with low-costs, company officials say.

 

Arun Iyengar, a senior director in Altera’s communications business unit, said that the combination of an Altera Stratix Series FPGA with high-performance regular expression processing is well suited to the continuously changing requirements of the content processing market. Iyengar also said that the RXP technology takes advantage of parallel processing, which enables it to scale to extremely high speeds, while offering scalability to be optimized for various market requirements.

 

The parallel and concurrent architecture of this solution enables throughput for regular expressions complying with Portable Operating System Interface, company officials say. Applications such as Intrusion (News - Alert) Detection and Prevention, Anti-virus, Anti-spam, Content/URL filtering and Application Detection, are aided by this functionality of the architecture, they say.

 

Titan IC Systems and Altera say they’ll display the RXP at the NXTcomm (News - Alert) trade show in Las Vegas this week.