ARCHITECTURE FOR TCAM SHARING

Aspects of the disclosure provide a packet processing system. The packet processing system includes a plurality of processing units, a ternary content addressable memory (TCAM) engine, and an interface. The plurality of processing units is configured to process packets received from a computer network, and to perform an action on a received packet. The action is determined responsively to a lookup in a table of rules to determine a rule to be applied to the received packet. The TCAM engine has a plurality of TCAM banks defining respective subsets of a TCAM memory space to store the rules. The interface is configured to selectably associate the TCAM banks to the processing units. The association is configurable to allocate the subsets of the TCAM memory space to groups of the processing units to share the TCAM memory space by the processing units.