Athena Announces Fastest Public Key Accelerator Core

Breaks 200 microsecond latency barrier for RSA-2048 operations

Gainesville, FL – February 6, 2013 - The Athena Group, Inc., the leader in high-performance public key cryptography, today announced the industry’s fastest public key (PK) accelerator core. Athena's commitment to maintaining leadership in the high performance PK marketplace is reinforced with the release of the first 64-bit member of Athena's powerful PK microprocessor family, the T6421.

The T6421 employs Athena’s patented arithmetic technology and patented cryptographic architecture to deliver extraordinary throughput across the entire spectrum of PK operations, and is specifically optimized for RSA-2048. The introduction of the T6421 establishes the new latency standard for RSA-2048 at less than 200 microseconds, over 5,000 per second, from a single core pair.

The TeraFire T6421 leverages advanced elliptic curve acceleration technology as well, delivering high performance EC-DSA, EC-DH, and other elliptic curve PK cryptography operations. The T6421 is a single-core design rather than an array implementation – so fastest also means lowest latency.

NIST SP800-57 advises that RSA-1024 is no longer viable, and recommends the use of RSA-2048, or stronger, today. RSA-2048 requires nearly an order of magnitude greater computation than RSA-1024. When combined with the explosion in the volume of SSL-based traffic generated by cloud computing, Web 2.0 applications, and other networked applications, RSA-2048 acceleration is mandatory. The T6421 employs a unique architecture that produces extraordinary computational horsepower, resulting in not only the fastest RSA-2048 operations available, but also the fastest RSA-1024, the fastest RSA-4096 operations, the fastest Diffie-Hellman operations, and more. The T6421 is not only faster, but considerably more efficient than other solutions, especially those executing on CPUs.

“Athena has established a new standard with the introduction 64-bit processing to our public key cryptography product line,” said Dr. Jon Mellott, CTO of Athena. “The 6400 architecture will allow Athena to maintain our performance and efficiency advantage for years to come. Strong security requires either large public key operations or elliptic curve cryptography, and Athena is the leader in both of those fields. We are uniquely qualified to offer our customers solutions that enable truly differentiated products."

The T6421 is a member of Athena's TeraFire family of cryptography microprocessors, the only programmable PK cryptography cores. Implementing Athena's proprietary instruction set architecture, the TeraFire microprocessors autonomously execute any PK or elliptic curve cryptography operation. This powerful, flexible microprocessor can easily accommodate new standards with a simple firmware update, ensuring that your application will always be able to handle new requirements and protocols.

The T6421 is offered with software drivers and a suite of firmware that executes high-level algorithms, such as RSA and EC-DSA, natively and autonomously on the T6421. Athena also provides both custom firmware development services and an assembler and simulator package for customers developing their own firmware.

Athena's TeraFire Security Accelerator Cores

With a complete family of security IP cores and software, and multiple levels of performance for every function, Athena supports your product succession strategy. TeraFire cores have been delivered in technologies ranging from FPGAs to ASICs, ready for integration into your product. Whether your next application is a low speed data terminal or a high performance network security appliance, Athena is ready to help you analyze your security hardware requirements and customize a package of functions for your specific application.

About The Athena Group, Inc.

For over 25 years, Athena’s leading-edge security and signal processing intellectual property (IP) cores have set the standard in overall performance, efficiency, and silicon area. Today, Athena offers a broad portfolio of solutions, from ciphers to security microprocessors, and from transforms to high performance FFT arrays. When your project needs world-class FPGA or ASIC technology, talk to Athena.

Athena was founded in 1986 and is privately held.

For more information, please visit www.athena-group.com.