US Patent 10097378 Efficient TCAM resource sharing

Various systems and methods for implementing efficient TCAM resource sharing are described herein. Entries are allocated across a plurality of ternary content addressable memories (TCAMs), with the plurality of TCAMs including a primary TCAM and a secondary TCAM, where the entries are allocated by sequentially accessing a plurality of groups of value-mask-result (VMR) entries, with each group having at least one VMR entry associated with the group, and iteratively analyzing the VMR entries associated with each group to determine a result set of VMR entries, with the result set being a subset of VMR entries from the plurality of groups of VMR entries, and the result set to be stored in the primary TCAM.