Elliptic Evaluation System Reduces Risk and Time to Market for IC Projects

– Ottawa, Canada. Elliptic Semiconductor today announced the immediate availability of its evaluation system – the EVAL-01. The system is designed to help integrated circuit developers to quickly install, configure and evaluate Elliptic’s TCP/IP, SSL and IPsec offload engines. Customers can now cut months from their IC development cycles and significantly reduce the risk in implementing these complex communications processors.

With the emergence of the network age, just about every electronic product is connected - from digital cameras, MP-3 players to home entertainment products such as televisions. This evolution is driving the need for ever higher bit rates from 50Mbps to 500Mbps and beyond. To support this throughput, system designers must move networking functions from software into hardware – which in turn generates demand for Elliptic offload engines. Prior to purchasing these complex networking products, customers want to thoroughly evaluate the designs and ensure that they completely comply with industry standards and meet their system throughput requirements.

”The EVAL-01 evaluation system helps solves two significant problems for our customers – risk and time to market.” said Al Hawtin, VP, Sales and Marketing of Elliptic Semiconductor. “Today’s IC design project typically require 12 to 18 months to complete, costs over ten millions dollars and target markets worth tens to hundreds of millions of dollars. Any tool that can shorten and de-risk a tape-out is very welcome.”

The time to market issue is twofold – an evaluation system that drops into a PC and saves an engineer several months of bench time is very easy to justify. Secondly, by doing this careful analysis up-front, a silicon re-spin can often be avoided thereby shaving many months of lost time and lost market share from a project.

The initial release of the EVAL-01 has a unit price of US$5995 and includes a PCI card and supporting Linux driver software. The current lead time for the card ranges between four to six weeks after receipt of order. Initially, the card includes the complete TCP/IP offload engine (the ELP-01) which allows the designer to attach the evaluation system either directly to the Internet or onto a test network. Once configured, all TCP/IP traffic is directed through the evaluation card hardware stack and is routed to applications such as browsers, ftp clients or other traffic analysis software supplied by the customer. Initial customers that purchase the evaluation system will be entitled to an upgrade to support both IPsec and SSL security (the ELP-11 and ELP-10) when they are released on the evaluation system over the coming months.

About Elliptic Semiconductor

Headquartered in Ottawa, Canada - Elliptic Semiconductor Inc (www.ellipticsemi.com) provides semiconductor IP cores for TCP/IP offload and IPsec or SSL security. The patented flow-through architecture used by Elliptic can greatly reduce the power required to do these functions in WLAN, Ultra-wideband, Bluetooth, W-CDMA, CDMA-2000, EDGE and other wireless data services. Alternatively, the processors can be applied to protocol and security needs at 100-1000 Mbps speeds in Ethernet switches, gateways, routers and access points where throughput is paramount. Elliptic offers complete system solutions including the semiconductor IP blocks as well as supporting embedded and system software in order to speed customers time to volume in these highly innovative and competitive markets.