Patent Document ID: 8189599
Application ID: 12862573
Patent Flag: 1

Claim One:
1. An omni-protocol data packet processing engine for managing communication of data packets between a processor and a high speed network fabric having a line speed of at least 10 Gb/second, the data packet processing engine comprising: an ingress portion of the data packet processing engine including: a plurality of ingress bit-stream stage processors, each ingress bit-stream stage processor having a programmable control memory unique to that ingress bit-stream stage processor; an ingress processor interface to the processor; an ingress network interface to the network fabric; and a multi-port data flow packet memory operably connected to the plurality of ingress bit-stream stage processors, the ingress processor interface and the ingress network interface; an egress portion of the data packet processing engine including: a plurality of egress bit-stream stage processors, each egress bit-stream stage processor having a programmable control memory unique to that egress bit-stream stage processor; an egress processor interface to the processor; an egress network interface to the network fabric; and a multi-port data flow packet memory operably connected to the plurality of egress bit-stream stage processors, the egress processor interface and the egress network interface; wherein the programmable control memory of each of the ingress and egress bit-stream stage processors is individually selectively dynamically programmable based on one of a plurality of protocols determined for a given data flow of one or more data packets and the ingress and egress bit-stream stage processors process the given data flow as a flow of bit stream data through the multi-port data flow packet memory such that processing of the given data flow by the plurality of the ingress and egress bit-stream stage processors is timed according to the flow of bit stream data and the flow of bit stream data is established at a rate that enables continuous operation of the data packet processing engine for all of the plurality of protocols substantially at a speed that is at least equal to the line speed of the high speed network fabric.