Overall Vision and Objectives/Goals

CAM-UP foresees that the future Internet and Internet of Things will stand on shoulders of powerful high-radix routers with multiple inter-connectivity links, which certainly requires fast AL operations. The overall vision is to resolve the long-established performance linerates-vs-AL-search rates gap and in this direction, CAM-UP aims to replace the last missing piece of the puzzle of fast packet routing, the T-CAM based memory, to enable AL functions using light instead of electrons, i.e. a complete optical alternative of the architecture in Fig. 2(i), to unleash unprecedented memory bandwidths. Three objectives are foreseen:

i) To design and experimentally demonstrate the first optical T-CAM cells

ii) To develop the theoretical groundwork of optical T-CAM memories

iii) To develop a set of wavelength encoding/decoding peripheral

iv) To demonstrate complete optical AL memories and functionalities