Rapid prototyping of an ATM programmable associative operator

In this paper, we describe a semi-automatic method for designing a programmable architecture related to high speed communication protocols. A case study of associative based architecture of high speed communication system is presented with a validation environment. The environment provides an interesting estimation using XILINX prototyping board including memories (content addressable memory, CAM, RAM, DPRAM). In our approach, we try to perform a rapid prototyping of such architecture and allow the designer to interact easily in order to customize the architecture according to application requirements. This method of validation provides important benefits in hardware prototyping: better validation environment and reduced time to give a real estimation for a large variety of applications.