Microsemi and The Athena Group, a supplier of security, cryptography, anti-tamper and signal processing IP cores, announced that Athena’s TeraFire cryptographic microprocessor has been integrated into Microsemi’s recently introduced PolarFire FPGA ‘S class’ family.
Athena’s TeraFire cryptographic microprocessor technology is designed to address cybersecurity requirements for a range of industries via support for the most commonly used cryptographic algorithms, including those certified for military/government use by the U.S. NIST’s Suite B, as well as those recommended in the U.S. Commercial National Security Algorithm (CNSA) suite. TeraFire also supports algorithms and key sizes commonly used in Internet communications protocols, such as TLS, IPSec, MACSec and KeySec.
Microsemi’s secure, cost-optimised PolarFire FPGAs offer low power consumption at mid-range densities with 12.7 Gbit/s SerDes transceivers, as well as high reliability, and target applications including wireline access networks and cellular infrastructure, smart connected factory, functional safety and secure communications.
PolarFire FPGAs’ transceivers also offer support for multiple serial protocols, making them suitable for communications applications with 10 Gigabit Ethernet, CPRI, JESD204B, Interlaken and PCIe. In addition, the ability to implement serial gigabit Ethernet (SGMII) on general purpose input/output (GPIO) enables multiple 1 Gigabit Ethernet links to be supported.
Microsemi noted that the TeraFire cryptographic microprocessor enables a significant improvement in built-in cryptographic capabilities compared to SRAM-based FPGAs and has been adopted by both defence and commercial customers as a result of its flexibility and efficiency.
Athena’s TeraFire cryptographic microprocessors can operation at up to 200 MHz. The TeraFire core provides advanced countermeasures against side-channel analysis (SCA) techniques such as DPA and differential electro-magnetic analysis (DEMA) that could otherwise be used to extract secret keys from the device, with supported algorithms that use a secret or private key offered with countermeasures against SCA.
Microsemi’s PolarFire ‘S class’ FPGAs equipped with Athena TeraFire cryptographic microprocessor are scheduled to be available by the end of the second quarter of 2017.
