Elliptic Semiconductor Launches Ultra Fast Link Security Product for Ethernet and Optical Transmission

– Ottawa, Canada. In response to the new IEEE standard for Ethernet link security that was developed as a solution to concerns about piracy of sensitive corporate, government or military information, Elliptic Semiconductor today announced the world’s fastest link security semiconductor IP product aimed at Ethernet Switching and Optical Transmission applications.

Until now, wired Ethernet connections were viewed as being difficult to compromise and Ethernet traffic was therefore generally left unencrypted. Increasingly however, a great deal of sensitive information is available on aggregate Ethernet links running at 1 and 10 Gigabits per second either on corporate local area networks or across wide area optical links. The technology to do both authentication and encryption of these very high speed links has not been possible until very recently with advances in both semiconductor process and cryptographic design.

The CLP-15 ultra-high throughput version of the product allows an optical transmission facility to be authenticated and encrypted at speeds up to 40 Gbps as is used in OC-192 and OC-768 optical transmission systems for core networking applications. The CLP-16 allows a 10 Gbps Ethernet link or multiple 1 Gbps Ethernet links to be authenticated and secured for enterprise networking applications.

“Security is a must particularly for aggregated traffic but prior to the release of the CLP-15 ultra-high speed authentication and encryption product, it was impossible to economically secure these Gigabit Ethernet and ultra-high speed optical links” said Al Hawtin, VP Sales and Marketing of Elliptic Semiconductor. “Using advanced design technology combining high speed message authentication through Galois Field Multiplication and the Advanced Encryption Standard cipher, a cost effective, high performance security solution has been achieved that will find immediate use in carriers, large enterprise, government and military installations.”

The CLP-15 and CLP-16 products are designed to drop into sophisticated networking integrated circuits as fully functional IP blocks. With the increasing complexity of System-on-Chip integrated circuits, designers are turning to proven IP blocks or virtual components from companies such as ARM, RAMBUS and Elliptic Semiconductor. These two new products are part of a family of link security solutions which will be extended with high performance key management protocol engines to be released early in 2005. License fees range from US$ 50,000 to US$250,000 depending on speed and the class of license selected by the customer.

About Elliptic Semiconductor

Headquartered in Ottawa, Elliptic Semiconductor Inc 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.