Athena Announces Cryptographic-Grade Random Number Generator

Gainesville, FL -- July 15, 2008 -- The Athena Group, Inc., the leader in cryptographic IP, today announced the immediate availability of multiple configurations of its silicon-proven random number generator (RNG) for cryptographic applications. Portable to any semiconductor process, Athena's TeraFire RNG cores are a fast and reliable way to incorporate cryptographic-grade random numbers into your SoC design.

Long recognized to be a challenge, creating an RNG poses the difficult problem of designing for unpredictability -- a goal opposite to most modern electronic design. While most design creation issues focus on ensuring that the circuit behaves the same way every time, an RNG must reliably operate differently every time. Athena has mastered this challenge, and delivers portable RNG IP blocks for any implementation technology.

The RNG-A100 is a minimum area solution that couples a non-deterministic entropy source (NRNG), containing multiple random oscillators, with a non-linear deterministic RNG (DRNG) to produce the highest quality RNG available today. When operated in the recommended configuration, the DRNG part of the RNG-A100 is designed to provide more than 9 exabits (9,000,000,000,000,000,000 bits) of reliably random data over a period of 5,800 years.

The RNG-A200 is an all-hardware Approved configuration that meets the demanding requirements of NIST SP 800-90 and tracks the new draft FIPS 140-3, including treatment of the internal state of the RNG as a critical security parameter. The RNG-A200 combines Athena's RNG-A100 core and 3DES or AES block cipher cores to provide a range of speed, area, and cryptographic strength options.

"TeraFire RNG cores integrate a number of advanced approaches to the generation of random numbers," states Jon Mellott, CTO of Athena. "They also complement Athena's comprehensive suite of cryptographic IP cores, providing the essential cryptographic-grade random numbers for use in key generation, key exchange, noise generation in communications applications, and more."

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® security cores, to Atomic DSP^TM cores, and Atomic SDR^TM software defined radio cores. Athena was founded in 1986 and is privately held. For more information visit: www.athena-group.com.