Athena Delivers Powerful 3GPP LTE Multi Radix FFT Processor Core

GAINESVILLE, FL - February 10, 2010 - The Athena Group, Inc., a leading provider of high-performance, low-power signal processing technology, today announced the general availability of its multi-radix FFT core for LTE and other OFDM-based wireless communications. The PFFT-M for LTE delivers the throughput needed for basestation LTE downlink OFDMA as well as the flexibility to handle the complexity of LTE uplink SC-FDMA in a single core.

The pipelined design supports radices 2, 3, 4, and 5, and transforms from 12-points to 8,192-points. All defined LTE transform lengths are supported, as are numerous other lengths including 1,536-points and powers of 2 up to 8,192-points. Most importantly, the pipelined LTE FFT is available at frequencies up to 500　MHz in less than 250　K ASIC gates, or as an FPGA-optimized implementation. Each design kit offers a bit accurate C model, an RTL simulation model and testbenches, synthesizable RTL, and a targeted netlist optimized for your process, library, and clock frequency. Athena employs a streamlined purchasing process, with standard license agreements, multiple licensing options, and automated IP production and verification to enable near-instantaneous delivery.

"Athena has been able to sustain a technology lead in the FFT market for nearly a decade," says Dr. Jon Mellott, CTO of Athena. "As the broadband communications industry adopts new protocols and increases throughput, the need for faster, more flexible FFT cores continues to fuel Athena's innovation. Athena FFT architectures address everything from compact to high performance solutions, with each delivering the area and power efficiency that customers have come to expect from Athena."

Athena's proprietary technology enables rapid configuration, implementation and delivery of IP cores specifically optimized for each user's performance, power, and die area. Years of research, development, and refinement have produced a broad selection of Athena signal processing core products, with incomparable performance and efficiency in FFT accelerators. And while more efficient at any performance level, Athena's technology scales to very high performance levels, making it ideal for the most challenging applications. Whether that challenge is total performance or minimum power consumption, applications ranging from GPS filters to WiFi, WiMAX, and even space-based reconfigurable receivers all rely upon Athena's advanced technology.

About The Athena Group, Inc.

Based in Gainesville, Florida, Athena innovates breakthrough technologies that achieve the optimum balance of power, performance, and silicon area in a wide range of applications such as wireless, satellite, and secure communications. Athena provides patented semiconductor intellectual property (IP) solutions, with products ranging from the market-leading TeraFire® cryptography cores, to Atomic DSP™ cores, and Atomic SDR™ software defined radio cores.

Athena was founded in 1986 and is privately held.

For more information, please visit www.athena-group.com.