US Patent 7284074 Pipelined network processing with FIFO queues

A system and method for operating on data within a network device is described. Between two data operations in a network device is a FIFO queue, which is used to separate the clock domains of the data operations. Data from the first operation is stored in the FIFO queue, which signals an indication to the second operation that there is data in the queue. When the second operation is signaled that there is data in the FIFO queue, it immediately begins reading data from the queue, and begins performing its prescribed operations on the data once it has read enough data from the queue for it to begin operating.