Nucleus Cipher Accelerator Increases Security Applications Performance

Mobile, AL - Accelerated Technology announced the availability of the Nucleus Cipher Accelerator software, a plug-in to the Nucleus Cipher Suite that adds support for hardware encryption acceleration. The software allows designers to boost the performance of their security applications, resulting in increased data throughput and lower processor utilization. The Nucleus Cipher Accelerator initially supports the Freescale Semiconductor ColdFire MCF5235, MCF5271, MCF5275, MCF547x, MCF548x and PowerPC MPC8272 processors.

"We are pleased Accelerated Technology has taken advantage of our ColdFire cryptography acceleration hardware," said Bill Krakar, microcontroller tools program manager for Freescale. "The availability of the Nucleus Cipher Accelerator software frees our customers from having to choose between performance and security when developing applications based on ColdFire processors."

The Nucleus Cipher Suite software is a collection of encryption ciphers or algorithms that can be used to secure sensitive data in devices, including defense, network equipment, for example routers and virtual private network (VPN) gateways, medical and point-of-sale terminals. Traditional software encryption ciphers can be slow and consume much of a central processing unit's (CPU) processing power. By adding the Nucleus Cipher Accelerator plug-in to an embedded application, the CPU intensive processing moves to the hardware, speeding up the encryption task and freeing the CPU to perform other more important tasks.

In addition to increased performance, developers using the Nucleus Cipher Accelerator plug-in also benefit from lower CPU utilization. Since the hardware processes the CPU-intensive encryption ciphers, total CPU utilization decreases, resulting in more CPU bandwidth for application designers.

"Silicon vendors are answering the growing security requirements of today's embedded devices with specialized encryption hardware," said Glen Johnson, product marketing manager, Accelerated Technology Division, Mentor Graphics. "Our Nucleus Cipher Accelerator plug-in is designed to fully utilize this hardware in order to maximize their performance for the embedded application and at the same time offer cost savings-a major benefit to our customers."

The Nucleus Cipher Suite plugs into the Nucleus Internet Protocol security (IPsec) software, the Nucleus Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol (L2TP) software, the Nucleus Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) software and the Nucleus Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP) software. These software protocols can now take immediate advantage of the increased performance offered by hardware encryption.

SOURCE: Mentor Graphics Corporation