Method and apparatus for efficiently reassembling fragments received at an intermediate station in a computer network

An IP packet reassembly engine provides high-speed and efficient reassembly of IP fragments received at an intermediate station in a computer network. The IP packet reassembly engine comprises a main controller logic circuit configured to "speed-up" re-assembly of original packets from IP fragments stored in a frame buffer at multi-gigabit per second rates. To that end, the reassembly engine further includes a content addressable memory having a plurality of entries for maintaining status information for each received fragment and for each original packet being reassembled from the fragments.