D'Crypt to Launch Gigabit Rijndael Cores under Altera Megafunction Partners Program (AMPP)

--Altera Corporation (Nasdaq: ALTR) today announced that D'Crypt Pte Ltd, a Singapore based high-tech company that specializes in providing high-end data security components and solutions, has joined the Altera Megafunction Partners Program (AMPP^SM). The first South East Asia AMPP partner, D'Crypt will offer a set of Gigabit key agile encryption and decryption cores based on the Rijndael algorithm to Altera customers developing high-end information security products.

Rijndael is the encryption algorithm selected by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) as the proposed new Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) cryptographic algorithm for use by the U.S. Government to protect sensitive (unclassified) information. It is anticipated that the algorithm will also be used by the private sector and outside of the United States.

"We are honored to join the Altera Megafunction Partners Program," said Dr Antony Ng, D'Crypt's chief executive officer. "The training provided to us as an AMPP partner allows us to meet the needs of our mutual customers by providing state-of-the-art intellectual property (IP) cores optimized for programmable logic devices."

"We are delighted to collaborate with an established IP provider such as D'Crypt as our newest AMPP partner," said Craig Lytle, vice president of Altera's intellectual property business unit. "Their valuable experience with decryption cores based on the Rijndael algorithm will benefit our mutual customers who are developing system-on-a-programmable-chip (SOPC) applications."

About D'Crypt AES Cores

D'Crypt's AES cores are optimized for Altera's APEX^TM 20KE programmable logic device (PLD) family and can perform encryption and decryption, based on the Rijndael algorithm, at rates in excess of 2.5Gbit/s. The encryption core utilizes 6,167 logic elements (LEs) while the decryption core requires 6,784 LEs. Both the encryption core and the decryption core require 50 embedded system blocks (ESBs) each, and can be clocked at 80MHz. They are fully key-agile, and hence allow the rapid switching of encryption/decryption keys without any performance penalty.
"Our AES cores use D'Crypt's proprietary transformations to achieve zero structural key-setup latency on both encryption and decryption. This allows our cores to achieve key agility and extremely high throughput at the same time. Our design also achieves symmetric throughput rates on both the encryption and decryption pipes. This symmetry in throughput is critical in most applications. These cores are possibly the fastest of their kind in the world today, and we are confident that the secure networking as well as secure storage community will find this product meeting their needs exactly," said Ng.

Licensing fee for the AES IP Core to be used in the APEX device is US $19,995.

About D'Crypt Private Limited

D'Crypt is a high-value design and development house. The company delivers full-spectrum leading-edge cryptographic technology and components that form integral parts of their customer's information security appliances, systems and applications.

D'Crypt brings a multidisciplinary team of highly skilled engineers and scientists to work on addressing challenging, next-generation cryptographic issues. They help customers to constantly achieve product excellence by supplying them with best of breed technology that have immediate practical uses and are full-system secure. More information on D'Crypt can be obtained on the Internet at http://www.d-crypt.com.

About Altera

Altera Corporation, The Programmable Solutions Company^®, was founded in 1983 and is a leading supplier of programmable logic devices (PLDs). Altera's CMOS-based PLDs are user-programmable semiconductor chips that enhance flexibility and reduce time-to-market for companies in the communications, computer peripheral, and industrial markets. By using high performance devices, software development tools, and sophisticated intellectual property cores, system-on-a-programmable-chip (SOPC) solutions can be created with embedded processors, memory, and other complex logic together on a single PLD. Altera common stock is traded on The Nasdaq Stock Market under the symbol ALTR. More information on Altera is available on the Internet at http://www.altera.com.

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