A Regular Expression Matching Circuit Based on an NFA with Multi-Character Consuming

This paper shows an implementation of a regular expression circuit based on an NFA (Non-deterministic finite automaton). Also, it shows that the NFA based one is superior to the DFA (Deterministic finite automaton) based one, with respect to the area complexity and the time complexity. A regular expression matching circuit is produced as follows: First, the given regular expressions are converted into a non-deterministic finite automaton (NFA). Then, to reduce the number of states, the NFA is converted to a modular non-deterministic finite automaton (MNFA(p)) with p-character-consuming transition. Finally, a finite-input memory machine (FIMM) to detect p-characters is generated, and the matching elements (MEs) realizing the states for the MNFA(p) are generated. We designed MNFA(p) for different p on Xilinx FPGA. As for the performance per area, our method is 6.2-18.6 times better than the DFA-based methods, and is 1.8 times better than the NFA-based method. Then, we derive an optimal value p that efficiently uses both LUTs and embedded memories of the FPGA.

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