Next generation internet protocol, IPv6, has attracted growing attention and has been deploying worldwide. With 128-bit address, IPv6 provides an extremely large address space and poses a great challenge to the routing table lookup algorithms. Today's efficient IPv4 routing table lookup schemes can hardly be competent for IPv6. In this paper, we propose a multi-stage IPv6 routing table lookup algorithm based on a sufficient study on the characteristics of the IPv6 address structure, the IPv6 address allocation policies, and the real world IPv6 backbone BGP routing tables. The proposed algorithm combines the binary tree, the segment table, and the route bucket other than adopting single technique as previous schemes do. Compared with previous algorithms, the proposed algorithm performs faster, occupies less memory, scales better, and supports incremental update.