There is a growing need for an improved information search and retrieval system to overcome the ever-increasing demand. In this paper, a high performance content processor for storage disks is proposed which could be easily installed in any host as an interface between the hard disk and the system bus. Moreover, a novel and powerful exact string matching architecture is presented using which we can search for several thousand strings at high rates. The average database size and associated software support systems are growing at rates that are greater than the increase in general purpose processor performance. Also, at the physical level there is a remarkable growth in disk storage performance. However, with the ever-increasing amounts of information available, the ability to accurately and quickly search and retrieve desired information has become a critical issue. We have implemented the proposed architecture on a Xilinx XC4VFX100 FPGA and shown that the system can search for over one-thousand 32 byte strings with a speed near the maximum stated in ATA-7 standard. Our design implementation has a much better performance as measured in Throughput/(LogicCells/Char) when compared with the best existing designs.

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