Patent ID: 7286566

Claim:
A method comprising: receiving onto an integrated circuit from a fiber optic cable a first number of packets, at most one of the packets being received at any one time on one of a second number of input ports of the integrated circuit, the first number being greater than the second number; segmenting the packets on a per port basis such that at any one time at most one packet is being segmented for each of the second number of input ports, the segmenting of a packet resulting in a plurality of segments; maintaining a number of segmentation contexts such that one segmentation context is maintained per packet being segmented, and using the segmentation context to generate a trailer that is appended to one of the segments of the packet being segmented, wherein each segmentation context comprises a byte count value and a cyclic redundancy check value; storing each of the segments of each of the first plurality of packets into a corresponding one of a plurality of buffers, the trailer appended to a segment being stored along with the segment into the plurality of buffers; and retrieving from the plurality of buffers the segments of the first number of packets and outputting each segment of the first number of packets from the integrated circuit to a switch fabric in the form of a switch cell, wherein the number of segmentation contexts maintained is less than the first number.