Abstract: A network accelerator for TCP/IP includes programmable logic for performing network protocol processing at network signaling rates. The programmable logic is configured in a parallel pipelined architecture controlled by state machines and implements processing for predictable patterns of the majority of transmissions. Incoming packets are compared with patterns corresponding to classes of transmissions which are stored in a content addressable memory, and are simultaneously stored in a dual port, dual bank application memory. The patterns are used to determine sessions to which an incoming IP datagram belongs, and data packets stored in the application memory are processed by the programmable logic. Processing of packet headers is performed in parallel and during memory transfers without the necessity of conventional store and forward techniques resulting in a substantial reduction in latency. Packets which constitute exceptions or which have checksum or other errors are processed in software.