Abstract
Regular expression pattern matching is widely used in applications such as computer virus vaccine, NIDS and DNA sequencing analysis. Hardware-based pattern matching is used when high-performance processing is required due to time constraints. ReCPU, SMPU, and REMP, which are processor-based regular expression matching processors, have been proposed to solve the problem of the hardware-based method that requires resynthesis whenever a pattern is updated. However, these processor-based regular expression matching processors inefficiently handle repetitive operations of regular expressions. In this paper, we propose a new instruction set to improve the inefficient repetitive operations of ReCPU and SMPU. We propose REMPi, a regular expression matching processor that enables efficient iterative operations based on the REMP instruction set. REMPi improves the inefficient method of processing a particularly short sub-pattern as a repeat operation OR, and enables processing with a single instruction. In addition, by using a down counter and a counter stack, nested iterative operations are also efficiently processed. REMPi was described with Verilog and synthesized on Intel Stratix IV FPGA.