Method and Apparatus for Adjustable Data Matching

A method and apparatus for performing a matching operation on data are disclosed. With an exemplary embodiment, a programmable logic device can be used to search for data of interest to an application, where the programmable logic device processes streaming data against a data key to generate a signal indicative of a similarity between the streaming data and the data key and compares the generated signal with a defined threshold to thereby determine whether the streaming data is deemed a match to the data key, wherein the threshold is adjustable to control whether the programmable logic device performs an approximate match operation or an exact match operation, and further to control, for an approximate match operation, a degree of approximate matches returned by the approximate match operation.