Elliptic Semiconductor launches acceleration engine for elliptic curve cryptography (ECC)

: Elliptic Semiconductor today announced the launch of a new acceleration engine - the CLP-17 designed in response to the elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) standards introduced by the U.S. National Institute of Science and Technology (www.nist.gov) and the IEEE (www.ieee.org).

“ECC technology cracks another significant barrier to widespread use of public key cryptography.” said Al Hawtin, VP Sales and Marketing of Elliptic Semiconductor. “Legacy public key algorithms for the Internet demanded high performance embedded processors or offload engines and as such inhibited the widespread use of public key based encryption design. Elliptic’s scalable ECC engines offer a complete family of products for systems ranging from smart cards, to PDAs all the way up to carrier class networking systems.”

Elliptic’s CLP-17 product allows customers to select cryptographic performance ranging from the smallest engine at 1,900 ECC operations per second to a high performance engine capable of performing up to 33,000 ECC operations per second.

ECC is a new standard that dramatically improves the performance of public key generation. Because the calculation is lighter than the traditional Internet algorithm, public key cryptography can be used in IPsec and secure socket layer (SSL) designs for devices as small as smart cards or cell phones. The engines can also operate at very high a speed allowing designers to use ECC in Ethernet Passive Optical Networks (EPON) where thousands of subscribers share a single gigabit data rate fiber optic cable and security is a significant concern.

When a web browser enters a secure web site, the browser and web server must exchange keys. This is very difficult to do securely across the public Internet and sophisticated algorithms developed by RSA Security have been implemented for this operation. The mathematics for these algorithms requires modular exponentiation on numbers as long as 1024 or 2048 bits, representing a significant burden on processors that normally manipulate 32 or 64 bit values. Through the new algorithms in ECC, key sizes in the range of only 191 to 233 bits generate equivalent security to the much heavier RSA algorithm mathematics.

The CLP-17 drops smoothly into any integrated circuit design and provides an immediate ECC capability for public key or digital signature applications. With the increasing complexity of integrated circuits, designers are turning to proven IP blocks or virtual components from companies such as ARM, RAMBUS and Elliptic Semiconductor. License fees range from US$ 40,000 to US$100,000 depending on speed and the class of license selected by the customer.

About Elliptic Semiconductor

Headquartered in Ottawa, Elliptic Semiconductor Inc (www.ellipticsemi.com) provides semiconductor products for secure communications ranging from low power TCP/IP implementations with associated IPsec and SSL security through ultra-high speed link security solutions multiple Gigabit per second throughput rates. All designs consist of comprehensive reference implementations including semiconductor IP blocks, software drivers and APIs and supporting software designed to speed time to market and offer complete, proven interoperability to customers.