Patent ID: 6990102

Claim:
A multiport switch comprising: a plurality of receive ports, the receive ports receiving frames in a network, the frames having a source field indicating the source of the frame and a destination field indicating an intended destination for the frame; a plurality of transmit ports, the transmit ports configured to transmit the frames in the network; and a logic circuit coupled to the receive ports and configured to determine frame forwarding information for the received frames, the logic circuit including a plurality of address lookup tables, each of the address lookup tables including a plurality of addressable table entries for storing information relating to the frames, each of the addressable table entries including at least a port vector field that identifies ports corresponding to the frames of the addressable table entries and an address field that identifies network addresses of the frames, the logic circuit, when performing a write operation to one of the plurality of address lookup tables, determines the one of the plurality of address tables to write to based on the least significant bit of one of the source field or the destination field of the received frame.