The fast data finder — An architecture for very high speed data search and dissemination

Advances in VLSI technology have made it practical to build special purpose processors to replace many of the sequential algorithms that are currently the bottlenecks in information processing. At TRW we have applied this approach to developing a text search and information dissemination system. The key component in this system is the Fast Data Finder, a single-chip text search engine with a pipelined architecture. The Fast Data Finder captures the common text search requirements of several major information processing applications. Its prototype version has a search speed of 4 million characters per second, independent of search condition, length, or complexity.