Network switching device with pipelined search engines

摘要

A switching device for forwarding network traffic to a desired destination on a network, such as a telephone or computer network. The switching device includes multiple ports and uses a lookup table to determine which port to forward network traffic over. The lookup table includes network addresses that are maintained in ascending or descending order. The switching device includes multiple binary search engines coupled in series including one or more precursor binary search engines and a final stage binary search engine. Together, the binary search engines perform an N iteration binary search. Additionally, a single search engine can perform multiple concurrent searches so that source and destination addresses can be obtained simultaneously and without wasted memory cycles.