NETWORK INTERFACE AND FIREWALL DEVICE

摘要

A network processing device provides a novel architecture for conducting firewall and other network interface management operations. In another aspect of the invention, a Unified Policy Management (UPM) architecture uses a same memory and processing structure to integrate firewall policy management with routing and switching decisions. In another embodiment, a Reconfigurable Semantic Processor (RSP) uses a parser to identify different syntactic elements that are then used by one or more Semantic Processing Units (SPUs) to carry out different firewall, network interface, routing, switching, and other packet processing operations.