Patent ID: 11968126
Assignee: MELLANOX TECHNOLOGIES, LTD.
Field: Digital communication (Electrical engineering)
Classification: CPC H | IPC H

Claim 0:
1. A method, comprising:
providing a library of hardware-agnostic packet-processing functions;
receiving, from a user, a functional hardware-agnostic specification of a packet-processing pipeline for use in a network device, the specification defined in terms of one or more of the packet-processing functions drawn from the library;
deriving, from the functional hardware-agnostic specification, a hardware-specific design of the packet-processing pipeline, the hardware-specific design comprising one or more netlists and/or Hardware Definition Language (HDL) circuit descriptions that are suited to manufacture a hardware device implementing the packet-processing pipeline, wherein deriving the hardware-specific design comprises (i) converting the functional hardware-agnostic specification into a hardware-agnostic intermediate representation, and (ii) generating the hardware-specific design from the intermediate representation; and
adding a new function or flow-pipe to the hardware-specific design, by:
converting a functional hardware-agnostic specification of the new function or flow-pipe into the intermediate representation; and
generating an updated hardware-specific design, which includes the new function or flow-pipe, from (i) the intermediate representation of the functional hardware-agnostic specification of the packet-processing pipeline and (ii) the intermediate representation of the new function or flow-pipe.