High-speed IP packet/Ethernet frame forwarding engine (CAFE) for ATM-based network router/bridge

The number of Internet users is now increasing rapidly because of the popularity of the WWW. Intra-nets and extra-nets have also become very popular as they enable efficient business processing. Accordingly, there is increasing demand for Internet/intra-net/extra-net services that offer higher speed, shorter delay, higher throughput, and stronger security at lower cost. To satisfy those demands, this paper proposes the network router/bridge concept that acts as a large router/bridge when constructing a nationwide computer network and a cut-through ATM-based forwarding engine (CAFE) that forwards IP packets/Ethernet frames with cell-by-cell processing in the network router/bridge. We also propose a hardware based fast search method to get the address entry table suitable for cell-by-cell processing, one of the key technologies of CAFE