US Patent 10454833 Pipeline chaining

Some embodiments provide a network forwarding integrated circuit (IC) for processing network packets. The network forwarding IC includes multiple packet processing pipelines and a traffic management unit. Each pipeline is configured to operate as an ingress pipeline and an egress pipeline. The traffic management unit is configured to receive a packet processed by an ingress pipeline and to enqueue the packet for output to a particular egress pipeline. A set of packets received by the network forwarding IC are processed by a first pipeline as an ingress pipeline and a second pipeline as an egress pipeline, then subsequently processed by the second pipeline as an ingress pipeline and a third pipeline as an egress pipeline.