PACKET CLASSIFICATION STATE MACHINE HAVING REDUCED MEMORY STORAGE REQUIREMENTS

A programmable state machine comprising a program memory and a processor is disclosed wherein the state machine operates with the processor accessing the program memory one or fewer times per state transition and wherein the data stored within the programmable memory is substantially optimized to support reduced memory requirements over those necessary according to the prior art. This is achieved by storing data as tables having a number of elements wherein some tables of data occupy less memory than other tables of data.