Patent US 7,895,412

A programmable processing engine processes transient data within an intermediate network station of a computer network. The engine comprises an array of processing elements symmetrically arrayed as rows and columns, and embedded between input and output buffer units with a plurality of interfaces from the array to an external memory. The external memory stores non-transient data organized within data structures, such as forwarding and routing tables, for use in processing the transient data. Each processing element contains an instruction memory that allows programming of the array to process the transient data as processing element stages of baseline or extended pipelines operating in parallel.