A new power management scheme enables us to apply the power-gating technique to a 200-Gbps packet forwarding circuit. The circuit is equipped with two 100-Gbps forwarding engines (FEs), each of which processes inbound and outbound packets. When the amount of traffic decreases and only one forwarding engine is capable of processing all incoming packets, a packet-route switch installed in the data path routes all packets to one of the two FEs and the other FE is shut off. This technique reduces the power consumption by 14% when the total traffic rate is less than half of the maximum rate of 200 Gbps.