Abstract: Techniques are described herein that may be used to buffer traffic received at a communications device. For example, a buffer external from a traffic processor may be used to buffer traffic in ingress or egress directions. For example, a bandwidth in each of directions of to and from the buffer may be less than a sum of maximum bandwidths in ingress and egress directions. For example, a single memory interface may be used to communicatively couple the buffer and the traffic processor.

Abstract: An apparatus and a method for flexibly configuring memory bandwidth allocations for different data channels is described. In one embodiment, the invention includes receiving data from a data communications channel, storing the data in a buffer, upon accumulating a predefined amount of data from the channel, determining a base address of a partition of a memory associated with the data communications channel, and storing a burst of the stored data in the memory partition.