Elliptic debuts new multi-packet processing security engine for high capacity wireless and network apps

OTTAWA, CANADA: Elliptic Technologies, a leading global supplier of security IP and software, unveiled today its latest security engine called the Multi-Packet Manager, a highly programmable and efficient security protocol accelerator with enhanced processing capabilities for multiple data streams.

The Multi-Packet Manager is perfectly suited for applications that deal with multiple active connections and significant traffic load on different contexts, such as 4G LTE-Advanced wireless cellular base stations and femtocells.

The market is experiencing an explosion of new multi-media enabled mobile devices that are connecting to networks in all market segments, from smartphones, tablets, datacom, to consumer electronics and smart grid. It is estimated that there will be more than 50 billion connected devices in use by 2020. This rapid growth puts a lot of pressure on the wireless and wireline system infrastructure processing power and capabilities, and increases the need for robust security solutions.

As an example, 4G LTE-Advanced femtocells and base stations will be required to handle many more simultaneous data and voice channels than what is commonly used today. This will require Embedded Systems and SoCs to process more data with increasingly aggressive performance and latency targets.

Elliptic’s Multi-Packet Manager is specifically designed to address these challenges by significantly reducing the CPU and software loads and by improving the system level latencies via autonomous packet processing and automated key caching mechanisms. The Multi-Packet Manager allows the host processor to dynamically add network packets to be processed while the security engine is busy processing data. Intelligent caching and pre-fetching reduces the bus traffic, internal buffering and power consumption without increasing the software load in a system.

“The ever increasing multimedia data traffic and the growth of mobile devices is posing a significant challenge for embedded systems to process more data faster and to provide the security means for devices and data that are so vital to people and businesses," said Vijay Dube, president and CEO of Elliptic Technologies. “Elliptic’s Multi-Packet Manager solves the challenge of processing multiple streams of data with aggressive system latency constraints and positions Elliptic at the forefront with leading-edge, complete security solutions backed by deep in-house security expertise.”

The Multi-Packet Manger can be preconfigured to match the customer’s system requirements. The engine reduces the CPU interrupt impact by allowing interrupts to be issued at the end of the packet list, after a specific number of packet descriptors have been processed, and on demand. To meet the needs of multiple security applications such as 3GPP/LTE-Advanced, IPsec, SRTP, MACsec and storage, Elliptic’s Multi-Packet Manager security engine offers support for all required cipher and message authentication algorithms. This allows designers to seamlessly integrate security functions tuned for the specific applications the SoCs are targeted at.