Patent ID: 8571035

Claim:
A method for processing a data unit received from a network, the method comprising: receiving a data unit at an input to a packet processor that is disposed in a communication network, the packet processor including i) a ternary content addressable memory (TCAM), ii) a memory separate from the TCAM, and iii) a parser separate from the TCAM and the memory, wherein a content of the TCAM and a content of the memory is programmable; responsive to a lookup of at least one portion of the data unit in the TCAM, obtaining indications of locations in a header of the data unit of one or more fields to be parsed from the data unit to perform a packet processing operation on the data unit; parsing the header with the parser using the indications of locations of one or more fields in the header to obtain data from the one or more fields; and performing a packet processing operation on the data unit using the data from the one or more fields parsed from the header.