Patent ID: 8681819

Claim:
A method of operating a packet parser in a computing system, comprising: receiving a data stream by the computing system; providing a configurable packet pointer by the packet parser, the packet pointer configured to index and extract a configurable number of atomic parsing elements in the data stream, wherein the extracted atomic parsing elements are non-contiguous in the data stream and have a configurable size; receiving the extracted atomic parsing elements from the data stream by the packet parser; and advancing the configurable packet pointer through the data stream based on a set of transition rules of a finite state machine (FSM) that are stored in a transition rule memory (TRM), the advancing of the configurable packet pointer comprising: selecting, by a current state completion (CSC) module, a current transition rule from the set of transition rules in the TRM based on the received extracted atomic parsing elements; and advancing, by a next state preparation (NSP) module, the configurable packet pointer based on the current transition rule selected by the CSC module; and receiving, by the next state preparation (NSP) module, a next set of extracted atomic parsing elements from the data stream based on the current transition rule selected by the CSC module.