ALEXANDRIA, Va., Oct. 28 -- United States Patent no. 12,457,172, issued on Oct. 28, was assigned to Barefoot Networks Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.).
"Packet header field extraction" was invented by Patrick Bosshart (Plano, Texas).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "Some embodiments provide a method for processing a packet for a pipeline of a hardware switch. The pipeline, in some embodiments, includes several different stages that match against packet header fields and modify packet header fields. The method receives a packet that includes a set of packet headers. The method then populates, for each packet header in the set of packet headers, (i) a first set of registers with packet header field value...