Patent ID: 7254632

Claim:
A search engine for matching textual patterns in a traffic stream, the search engine comprising: a traffic control unit capable of managing the traffic stream comprising a sequence of data packets; a microcode memory capable of storing and retrieving microcode instructions corresponding to a textual pattern; a comparator capable of executing said micro-code instructions to match the textual pattern to a data sequence beginning in a first packet of said traffic stream and ending in a second packet subsequent to the first packet in said traffic stream; and a report memory capable of storing and retrieving reports generated by said comparator responsively to a result of matching said textual pattern to said data sequence, wherein the comparator is arranged to generate and save in the report memory at least one of a current instruction number and a traffic pointer value after matching a part of the textual pattern in the first packet, and to retrieve the at least one of the current instruction number and the traffic pointer value in order to continue matching the textual pattern in the second packet.