Athena Joins Actel CompanionCore Program

Silicon-Proven Cryptography IP at Introductory Pricing - Featuring Actel FPGAs

GAINESVILLE, FL – August 31, 2009 – The Athena Group, Inc., the leader in high-performance public key (PK) cryptography IP cores, announces the immediate availability of its silicon-proven cryptography cores for Actel IGLOO® and ProASIC®3 FPGAs. And, for a limited time, Athena is offering introductory pricing on the entire family of cryptography products for Actel FPGAs, with most symmetric encryption cores available for US$10,000 or less. All configurations of AES and SHA are included in this introductory offer. Athena is also offering introductory pricing on random number generators (RNG) as well as PK cryptography microprocessors.

Athena’s full line of cryptography cores is now available through Actel, with many functions available in both high performance and minimum area options. Several of the Athena cores including RNG, PK cryptography, and SHA-2 products represent entirely new functionality to the CompanionCore program. For example, the F5200 PK cryptography microprocessor delivers all the performance and flexibility of a fully programmable cryptographic microprocessor, and supports not only RSA and Diffie-Hellman, but all elliptic curve operations as well.

"Actel’s customers want power efficiency, performance, and value. But they also want choice," stated Mike Brogley, IP and Solutions Product Marketing Manager at Actel Corporation. "The addition of Athena’s full line of cryptography cores further underscores Actel’s commitment to deliver secure solutions for a wide range of applications in the communications, consumer, military, aerospace, aircraft, and industrial markets."

"In today’s changing market, customers are increasingly choosing FPGAs as their design platform," says Pat Rugg, Vice President of Sales for Athena. "Joining Actel’s CompanionCore Alliance Program made perfect sense. Actel and Athena both serve the same market spaces, including consumer, industrial, communications, military, and aerospace. Athena’s cores are silicon proven, area and performance competitive, and aggressively priced. Actel is the clear choice for low-power FPGAs."

Athena offers a streamlined purchasing process, with standard license agreements to enable near-instantaneous delivery. Athena IP cores are available either as synthesizable RTL or targeted netlists, and licenses for both individual projects and entire sites are available. In addition, Athena provides a continuous migration path from single project to multiple projects, from FPGA to ASIC, and offers discounted pricing for returning customers who wish to upgrade their existing licenses or license additional cores.

Athena TeraFire Cryptography Products

Athena TeraFire cryptography products for Actel include:

• True Random Number Generator
• Advanced True Random Number Generator
• F5200 Public Key Microprocessor
• SHA1
• SHA-2 (224/256/384/512)
• Fast AES
• Fast AES-CCM
• Fast AES-GCM
• Standard AES
• Standard AES-CCM
• Standard AES-GCM

For performance and area data on each Athena core go to www.athena-group.com/actelip.html or www.actel.com/products/partners/companioncore/athena.aspx.

Athena’s true RNGs for Actel offer cryptographic grade random numbers, with a two part implementation that ensures maximum entropy and failsafe operation. Athena’s smallest RNG is tested against NIST SP800-22, while Athena’s advanced RNG is designed for compliance with NIST SP800-90 and FIPS 140-3 (draft).

Athena’s TeraFire cryptography microprocessors unlock a new level of flexibility and performance for your security applications – with firmware reprogrammability and the highest performance, lowest latency operations in a small footprint core.

Athena’s SHA cores are compliant with FIPS 180-2, and support data rates ranging to greater than 600 Mbps. All models all are fully synchronous, feature 32-bit and/or 64-bit data input ports, and provide a full width message digest output for optimal throughput and latency. Rapid context save and reload features enable timesharing of the SHA cores for large messages.

Athena’s AES cores are compliant with FIPS 197 and NIST SP800-38A defined operating modes, including ECB, CBC, CFB, OFB, and CTR. Two models are available, fast and standard, with support for CCM and GCM modes (SP800-38D) also available.

Optional bus interfaces, including AHB and AXI, provide a seamless integration path.

Athena’s full line of products can be found on www.athena-group.com.

About Actel

Actel is the leader in low-power FPGAs and mixed-signal FPGAs, offering the most comprehensive portfolio of system and power management solutions. Power Matters. Learn more at www.actel.com.

About The Athena Group, Inc.

Based in Gainesville, Florida, Athena innovates breakthrough technologies that achieve the optimum balance of power, performance, and silicon area in a wide range of applications such as wireless, satellite, and secure communications. Athena provides patented semiconductor intellectual property (IP) solutions, with products ranging from the market-leading TeraFire® cryptography cores, to Atomic DSP™ cores, and Atomic SDR™ software defined radio cores.

Athena was founded in 1986 and is privately held.

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