Quantitative Analysis of Run-Time Reconfigurable Database Search

This paper reports two contributions to the theory and practice of reconfigurable search engines based on hashing techniques. The first contribution concerns technology-independent optimisations involving run-time reconfiguration of hash functions; a quantitative framework is developed for estimating design trade-offs, such as the amount of temporary storage versus reconfiguration time. The second contribution concerns methods for optimising implementations in Xilinx FPGA technology, which achieve different trade-offs in cell utilisation, reconfiguration time and critical path delay; quantitative analysis of these trade-offs is provided.