Abstract: A method and device are disclosed for an associative and approximate, analog or digital scanning of databases that allows for the asynchronous accessing of data from a mass storage medium. The invention includes providing dedicated analog and digital circuitry and decision logic at the mass storage medium level for determining a key identifying the data of interest, continuously comparing the key to a signal generated from a reading of the data from the mass storage medium with an approximate or exact matching circuit to determine a pattern match, determining a correlation value between the key and the data as it is read in a continuous fashion, and determining a match based upon a preselected threshold value for the correlation value. The pattern matching technique eliminates any need to compare data based on its intrinsic structure or value, and instead is based on an analog or digital pattern. The key and data may be either analog or digital.

Abstract: A data storage and retrieval device and method is disclosed. The device includes at least one magnetic storage medium configured to store target data and at least one re-configurable logic device comprising an FPGA coupled to the at least one magnetic storage medium and configured to read a continuous stream of target data therefrom, having been configured with a template or as otherwise desired to fit the type of search and data being searched. The re-configurable logic device is configured to receive at least one search inquiry in the form of a data key and to determine a match between the data key and the target data as it is being read from the at least one magnetic storage medium. This device and method can perform a variety of searches on the target data including without limitation exact and approximate match searches, sequence match searches, image match searches and data reduction searches.

Abstract: Disclosed herein is an improved architecture for regular expression pattern matching. Improvements to pattern matching deterministic finite automatons (DFAs) that are described by the inventors include a pipelining strategy that pushes state-dependent feedback to a final pipeline stage to thereby enhance parallelism and throughput, augmented state transitions that track whether a transition is indicative of a pattern match occurring thereby reducing the number of necessary states for the DFA, augmented state transition that track whether a transition is indicative of a restart to the matching process, compression of the DFA's transition table, alphabet encoding for input symbols to equivalence class identifiers, the use of an indirection table to allow for optimized transition table memory, and enhanced scalability to facilitate the ability of the improved DFA to process multiple input symbols per cycle.

Abstract: A method and device are disclosed for an associative and approximate, analog or digital scanning of databases that allows for the asynchronous accessing of data from a mass storage medium. The invention includes providing dedicated analog and digital circuitry and decision logic at the mass storage medium level for determining a key identifying the data of interest, continuously comparing the key to a signal generated from a reading of the data from the mass storage medium with an approximate or exact matching circuit to determine a pattern match, determining a correlation value between the key and the data as it is read in a continuous fashion, and determining a match based upon a preselected threshold value for the correlation value. The pattern matching technique eliminates any need to compare data based on its intrinsic structure or value, and instead is based on an analog or digital pattern. The key and data may be either analog or digital.

Abstract: A method and apparatus are disclosed for using decision logic deployed on a reconfigurable logic device to process a stream of financial information at hardware speeds. The decision logic can be configured to perform data reduction operations on the financial information stream. Examples of such data reductions operations include data processing operations to compute a latest stock price, a minimum stock price, and a maximum stock price.

Abstract: A data storage and retrieval device and method is disclosed. The device includes at least one magnetic storage medium configured to store target data and at least one re-configurable logic device comprising an FPGA coupled to the at least one magnetic storage medium and configured to read a continuous stream of target data therefrom, having been configured with a template or as otherwise desired to fit the type of search and data being searched. The re-configurable logic device is configured to receive at least one search inquiry in the form of a data key and to determine a match between the data key and the target data as it is being read from the at least one magnetic storage medium. This device and method can perform a variety of searches on the target data including without limitation exact and approximate match searches, sequence match searches, image match searches and data reduction searches.