Patent ID: 7519735

Claim:
A routing device comprising: a midplane; a power supply coupled to the midplane to supply power along the midplane; a plurality of removable interface cards removably coupled to the midplane to communicate packets using a network; and a router module removably coupled to the midplane separate from the plurality of removable interface cards, the router module comprising a packet forwarding engine, memory, a memory management unit, and an interface card concentrator module wherein the packet forwarding engine, memory management unit, and the interface card concentrator module are integrated into a single unit, wherein the midplane provides power from the power supply to the router module only when the router module is properly inserted into the midplane, wherein the interface card concentrator module receives packets from at least two of the removable interface cards, wherein contents of the received packets are stored in the memory, wherein the memory management unit generates notifications based on keys of the received packets and forwards the notifications to the packet forwarding engine, wherein the packet forwarding engine performs route lookups for the packets based on the keys in response to the notifications, and wherein the interface card concentrator module sends the packets from the memory to the removable interface cards as output bound packets based on the route lookups performed by the packet forwarding engine in response to the notifications.