Patent 7872890 was granted and assigned to NetLogic Microsystems on January, 2011 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
A counter circuit is configured to simultaneously maintain individual character match count values for a plurality of overlapping substrings of an input string of characters that match a portion of a regular expression stored in a plurality of rows of content addressable memory (CAM) cells of a ternary CAM device. The counter circuit is selectable between a normal operational mode in which all matching portions of the input string are identified, and a minimum match length operational mode in which only matching portions of the input string that have at least a specified minimum number of characters are identified.