Abstract
A hardware pattern matcher is presented, which searches for patterns on a data flow, such as characters read from a disk. The backing up on the data flow, for a general pattern matching, is avoided by means of a set of cells running in parallel. Each cell can search for a pattern independently, but requires only one one-character comparator. The interesting feature of this search hardware is the use of a simple priority line which can dynamically allocate these cells. Further, the number of cells required can be arbitrarily reduced by means of a marking technique which is also accomplished by the priority line. Finally, an information retrieval system, based on this basic pattern matching hardware is presented. Here the content as well as the context search are done by using the same marking technique.