Cavium Networks Delivers World's Fastest Security Macro Processor; Cavium Networks is Now...

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 8, 2002

Cavium Networks, a fabless semiconductor company today announced that it has been sampling the NITROX(TM) Security Macro processor since March 2002. The NITROX processor is a single chip security-processing solution

"Today by announcing NITROX's availability, we are changing the security processing landscape forever," said Syed Ali, President and CEO of Cavium Networks. "NITROX's value proposition of 10x performance with low cost, power and area will change the economics of security deployment. With easy integration and low cost, we will enable wide spread deployment of secure applications that we have only talked about. Secure DNS, iSCSI, authenticated Microsoft .NET services and traditional SSL, IPsec applications can now be integrated into systems with little to no performance penalty."

Custom microprocessor design techniques give NITROX the highest performance at the lowest cost, power and area. NITROX's unique architecture allows Macro offload of protocol processing to reduce the required host CPU cycles and efficiently utilize precious I/O bandwidth. Other key features include programmability to accommodate future protocol changes and adaptive processing to dynamically switch between asymmetric or bulk data application requirements. NITROX supports cryptographic ciphers RSA, Diffie-Helman, 3DES, ARC4, AES, MD5 and SHA-1 at rates greater than 50K RSA OPS or 5Gbps 3DES+SHA-1.

"NITROX sets a new pace in the security processor market, outrunning all other available products in both IPSec and SSL applications," said Linley Gwennap, principal analyst at The Linley Group. "In fact, at up to 40,000 SSL handshakes per second, NITROX is literally ten times faster than the leading SSL accelerators from Broadcom and Hifn today."

Complete NITROX Evaluation system with PCI, PCI-X or HyperTransport(TM) I/Os is now available to enable system designers to quickly integrate high performance SSL or IPsec functionality into their networking equipment. The Evaluation system includes low level drivers, middleware and application reference code. The Evaluation system can be used in a wide variety of networking equipment such as routers, switches, web-servers, server load balancers, firewalls, SANs, and VPN gateways. The NITROX evaluation board has local DRAM for IPsec SA or SSL session context, an EEPROM for private key storage and a separate USB or RS232 for trusted path (PSE) key management. The PSE interface facilitates the development of FIPS 140-2 certified devices by providing a tight cryptographic boundary.

The NITROX family consists of many products ranging from medium to very high performance products with varying features and price. The products now available include SSL acceleration CN1120s-350, CN1230s-350, CN1240s-350, CN1340s-450 and IPsec acceleration CN1120i-350, CN1230i-350, CN1240i-350, CN1340i-450. Prices range from $200 to $600 in volume. For detailed chip and evaluation system pricing please contact Cavium Networks.

About Cavium Networks

Cavium Networks is a semiconductor company focused on developing and manufacturing high performance security processing solutions that will enable the new Internet security infrastructure. Cavium's highly integrated, feature rich NITROX family of Security Macro Processors delivers unprecedented performance in SSL based secure e-Business and IPsec based network security applications while significantly reducing the cost and complexity of deployment. Cavium Networks is headquartered in the heart of Silicon Valley in San Jose, CA with an IC design center in Marlboro, MA. For more information, please visit: http://www.cavium.com

Product photos, datasheets and application notes are available upon request. NITROX is a trademark of Cavium Networks, Inc. The HyperTransport(TM) Consortium, HyperTransport(TM) Technology and combinations thereof are trademarks of HyperTransport(TM) Consortium. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Glossary of terms

Term                    Definition

AES                     Advanced Encryption Standard (AES).
                         A cryptographic algorithm to succeed DES

ARC4                    A cryptographic algorithm

DES/3DES                Data Encryption Standard cryptographic
                         algorithms

Diffie-Hellman          A key agreement algorithm published by
                         Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman

FIPS 140-2              Federal Information Processing Standard for
                         security requirements

HyperTransport(TM)      High-speed, high-performance, point-to-point
                         link for integrated circuits

IPsec                   IP security protocol

RSA                     Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (RSA). An algorithm for
                         asymmetric cryptography

SSL                     Secure Socket Layer. An Internet protocol for
                         web security

VPN                     Virtual Private Network

iSCSI                   IP based storage protocol