Barco Silex presents enhanced version of Public Key hardware solution

Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium – February 24, 2011 – Barco Silex, Barco's center of competence for electronic design, has announced an enhanced version of its Public Key Hardware Accelerator. The BA414E is the first member of a new generation of Crypto Intellectual Property (IP) cores developed, validated and licensed by Barco Silex.

Capitalizing on its silicon-proven experience with cryptography and security hardware processing, Barco Silex is sharing its strong expertise in ASIC, System-on-Chip & FPGA design and its experience as IP Integrator & Developer by offering innovative & cost-efficient solutions for Embedded Security.

"The BA414E Public Key Crypto Engine is the first product of a new family of Cryptography and Security IP cores. The design team really focused on providing tremendous efficiency to make embedded security integration much easier and straightforward. We are proud to propose universal, fast & small footprint solutions, supporting a lot of capabilities for a wide range of applications and technologies." says Philippe Lorent, Product Manager at Barco Silex.

Public Key cryptography is mainly used for digital signature and key exchange protocols. While symmetric cryptography like AES, requires large throughput and tricky features, asymmetric cryptography like RSA, is a very compute-intensive process that consumes a lot of CPU resources in security systems.

Software solutions running on embedded CPU are often too slow for applications with real-time requirements. The overhead generated on the CPU has an impact on performances that quickly becomes a penalty for the whole system. On the other hand, current hardware accelerators often consume a large part of the silicon and are not flexible enough to be used as stand-alone solutions.

It is to overcome these issues that Barco Silex introduced this BA414E Public Key Crypto Engine, a flexible, scalable and portable hardware accelerator IP.

The BA414E, based on a scalable, highly pipelined and optimized arithmetic unit, exploits efficiently the high potential of parallelism offered by hardware implementations. Such solutions provide the best trade-off between performance and area in any configuration. With the use of re-configurable elementary DSP blocks, the BA414E can be easily mapped to any existing FPGA technology as well as all ASIC processes.

“With just less than 30k ASIC gates, the BA414E is the ideal solution for applications with strong constraints on cost & power." continues Philippe Lorent. "By just stretching the hardware, the same core is able to execute more than 5000 operations per second for 1024-bit CRT sign or decrypt."

The BA414E is a “Smart Engine”, this means that it does not require any assistance from the main CPU to handle the complete Public Key processing. Based on a cost-effective µ-coded sequencer (coupled to a µ-DMA), the core is able to support a lot of complex operations and algorithms like RSA, CRT, DSA & ECDSA, including Pre- & post-processing.

"Selecting and integrating an IP Core remains a challenging process. I know that the BA414E Public Key Crypto Engine will solve recurrent IP problems. With its 100% CPU offload solution, it will simplify the integration of Public Key solutions. Best of all, it will keep silicon resources and power consumption at an extremely low level. Based on the same philosophy, Barco Silex will soon introduce the enhanced version of its AES hardware accelerator, the BA411E." says Thierry Pauwels, Marketing & Sales support for IP Business at Barco Silex.

With the announcement of this new Public Key Crypto Engine, Barco Silex emphasizes its continuous will to offer high-added value solutions and services to help its customers to build more secure designs while meeting stronger constraints of time, budget & power.