Patent ID: 7538694

Claim:
A network device, comprising: a port for coupling to a network; network logic coupled to the port, wherein the network logic is operable to perform processing on packets received from and/or provided to the port; a parallel compression/decompression engine coupled to at least one of the port and the network logic, wherein the parallel compression/decompression engine is operable to compress and/or decompress data comprised in at least a portion of the packets; wherein the parallel compression/decompression engine comprises a parallel compression engine for compressing uncompressed data, wherein the parallel compression engine comprises: an input for receiving uncompressed data, wherein the uncompressed data comprises a plurality of symbols; a history table comprising entries, wherein each entry comprises at least one symbol; a plurality of comparators for comparing the plurality of symbols with entries in the history table in a parallel fashion, wherein the plurality of comparators produce compare results; match information logic coupled to the plurality of comparators for determining match information for each of said plurality of symbols based on the compare results; and an output coupled to the match information logic for outputting compressed data in response to the match information, wherein said compressed data includes a count value and an entry pointer for a contiguous match, wherein the entry pointer points to the entry in the history table which produced the contiguous match, wherein the count value indicates a number of matching symbols in the contiguous match.