A Bloom filter is a simple space-efficient randomised data structure for representing a set in order to support network and database query systems. Although Bloom filters have been heavily used in database applications in 1970s, they have only recently received widespread attention in the networking literature. Software applications frequently fail to identify so many signatures through comparisons at very high speeds. We introduce a low power Bloom filter architecture, which is space and power effective in hardware platforms. Instead of working on programming phase or technology, our work concentrates on lookup techniques of Bloom filters. In this paper, we propose a new multi-stage lookup technique for Bloom filters and the theoretical power analysis of the proposed lookup techniques is presented. Power analysis shows that a decrease in the number of hash functions per stage results in power gain. © Institution of Engineers Australia, 2011.