Master’s Thesis: The design and implementation of a lightweight automata processor

This thesis covers the research, hardware architecture prototyping, and hardware-software co-design of a lightweight Automata Processor tailored for large-scale pattern matching (multi-string matching) workloads.

The project was completed at the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in June 2021, receiving the Outstanding Graduate award.

Key Contributions:

• Hardware Architecture Design: Designed and prototyped a lightweight pattern-matching processor core using Verilog HDL, accelerating regex and symbol transition workloads with high memory efficiency.
• FPGA Prototyping & Heterogeneous Integration: Successfully instantiated the accelerator on physical FPGA boards and integrated the processor core with ARM CPUs to establish an efficient heterogeneous computing runtime environment.

Recommended citation: Haojun Xia. "The design and implementation of a lightweight automata processor." Master's Thesis, University of Science and Technology of China, 2021.