1. A method of operating a storage unit of a finite state machine, the storage unit comprising: a computer readable medium having executable instructions stored thereon to execute the method, the method comprising: organizing information concerning an operation of the machine in a payload-transition matrix, in which at least a first column is a finality vector indicating an end of data defined by the payload-transition matrix, a second column indicates production values of the data and other columns describe valid transitions between states of the machine depending on input characters; and compressing the payload-transition matrix in a row-displaced format associating the finality vector, the production values and each state with a unique base index.