The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Jul. 24, 2001
Filed:
Sep. 29, 1998
Daniel Ullum, San Jose, CA (US);
Thomas J. Edsall, Mountain View, CA (US);
Soei-Shin Hang, Sunnyvale, CA (US);
Cisco Systems, Inc., San Jose, CA (US);
Abstract
An improved look up mechanism for accessing a RAM to obtain forwarding information for data frames being transported among ports of a high-performance switch is provided. The look up mechanism includes a multi-page look up table and associated hashing technique. A media access control (MAC) address and a virtual local area network (VLAN) identifier are transformed with a hash function to obtain a hash key. The hash key is an address pointing to a particular entry in the look up table. A virtual first page is also derived from the hash key, which selects a particular physical page of the look up table to be initially accessed each time that MAC address/VLAN pair is used. The look up mechanism may also be used to access a short cut table containing Layer 3 short cut information. In either case, ultimately, the likelihood is increased that a match will be found on the first RAM access, thus maintaining high-speed switch performance.