New Exar Mezzanine Encryption Cards

Exar Corporation expanded its encryption and compression card offerings into the Advanced Telecommunications Computing Architecture (ATCA) market with the introduction of the Hifn Express DS 4050 family of Advanced Mezzanine Cards (AMC).

Leveraging the Hifn 9155, the third generation of Hifn’s FlowThrough Applied Services Processors (ASP), the Express DS 4050 completely off-loads the host CPU from all encryption and compression processing for up to four gigabit Ethernet ports – maximizing system performance and power efficiency, minimizing the host CPU load, and reducing overall system costs.

Providing off-the-shelf, production ready solutions, the DS 4050 is architected to address carrier grade applications requiring wire-speed IP-based security for the telecommunications, wireless, VoIP, and IP networking markets. The DS 4050 offers support for Suite B encryption and authentication, as well as advanced information assurance features, making the DS 4050 ideal for government applications. The DS 4050 AMC family is available in both two and four port options with SerDes and PCI Express based host interfaces enabling flexibility for system design, and simplifying deployment of next-generation equipment with stronger, interoperable encryption.

"Hardware accelerated encryption and compression complements the modularity and flexibility offered by the ATCA platform," said Lee Doyle, group vice president, network infrastructure, IDC. "By off-loading the host processor from these CPU-intensive operations, system performance and efficiency are enhanced enabling the addition of bandwidth hungry applications."

As each successive generation of technology demands higher performance from the host CPU, designers will increasingly look to the Express DS 4050 to automatically off-load the CPU-intensive encryption and compression operations in order to maintain system performance, and offer deterministic, low latency to support real-time sensitive applications such as VoIP and multi-media gateways.

"The next generation of ATCA systems is being driven by multimedia applications that demand high-bandwidth and increased security," said Rob Reiner, marketing director, Datacomm and Storage, Exar. "The Express DS 4050 is ideally suited for these applications and with the support for the Suite B algorithms offers our OEMs a way to open up or broaden their government market solutions."

About The DS 4050
The standards-based DS 4050 family of solutions conforms to the PICMG AMC.0 R2.0 Advanced Mezzanine Card specification. They are single width, full height, AMC form factor cards supporting both mid and full size faceplates. The family includes dual and quad port gigabit Ethernet cards that are SerDes-based, and a dual port gigabit Ethernet card that is PCI Express-based. The DS 4050 offers on-chip IKE support, further extending its ability to offload the host CPU and optimize the system processor efficiency. The DS 4050 supports IPsec, IPcomp, SRTP, and MACsec, and all variants of the DS 4050 family draw less than 10 watts typical, reducing system costs for power and cooling. The quad port card supports 128K security associations and the dual port variants each support 64K security associations. The DS 4050 comes with a user friendly, comprehensive software development kit (SDK) that enables easy integration and rapid time to market.

Availability
Samples of the Express DS 4050 will be available in December with general availability expected in Q1 of 2010.