Pattern matching is one of critical parts of Network Intrusion Prevention Systems (NIPS) and computationally intensive. To handle a large number of attack signature fattens increasing everyday, a network intrusion prevention system requires a multi pattern matching method that can meet the line speed of packet transfer. In this paper, we analyze Snort, a widely used open source network intrusion prevention/detection system, and its pattern matching characteristics. A multi pattern matching method for NIPS should efficiently handle a large number of patterns with a wide range of pattern lengths and case insensitive patterns matches. It should also be able to process multiple input characters in parallel. We propose a multi pattern matching hardware accelerator based on Shift-OR pattern matching algorithm. We evaluate the performance of the pattern matching accelerator under various assumptions. The performance evaluation shows that the pattern matching accelerator can be more than 80 times faster than the fastest software multi-pattern matching method used in Snort.