US Patent 7463630 Multi-part parsing in a network device

A network device for processing data on a data network includes a plurality of ports, configured to receive data from a data network and to send processed data to the data network, a memory management unit configured store data on and retrieve data from the memory and a multi-part parser configured to parse the data received. The multi-part parser comprises several parsing blocks configured to serially parse the data, with each block designated to parse particular values and where each block but a first block receives parsed data from a prior block with the particular values at a zero offset position.