February 2, 2009

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Athena Announces the First Cryptography Microprocessor for Embedded and Mobile Applications

Newest addition to TeraFire® family delivers 200 RSA-1024 private key ops/sec in 25K-gates, including memory

Gainesville, FL - February 2, 2009 - The Athena Group, Inc., the world leader in high-performance public key (PK) cryptography cores, today announced the introduction of the TeraFire® F5200 cryptography microprocessor. Capable of tackling every mainstream PK cryptography algorithm - from RSA to Suite B - and area optimized for even the most challenging applications, the F5200 is the perfect security solution for embedded and mobile products.

With configurations starting at 25K-gates, including memory, and 200 RSA-1024 private key operations per second, the F5200 provides as much as 50x greater performance than competitive solutions with similar area. The F5200 uses Athena's proprietary PK instruction set architecture for virtually any PK operation, including the myriad elliptic curve cryptography algorithms. This powerful, flexible instruction set can easily accommodate new standards with on-the-fly programmability, ensuring that your application will always be able to handle new requirements and protocols.

“The F5200 sets a new standard for performance density - truly remarkable area, throughput, and latency,” states Dr. Jon Mellott, CTO of Athena. “And with flexible firmware and optional AES and SHA functions, the F5200 covers a full spectrum of security requirements. Customers in the embedded and mobile markets can immediately benefit from this type of power-saving, high performance solution.”

Athena's TeraFire Security Accelerator Cores
With a complete family of security IP cores and software, and multiple levels of performance for every function, Athena supports your product succession strategy. TeraFire cores have been delivered in technologies ranging from FPGAs to structured and standard cell ASICs, ready for integration into your product. Whether your next application is a low speed data terminal or a high performance network security appliance, Athena is ready to help you analyze your security hardware requirements and customize a package of functions for your specific application.

About The Athena Group, Inc.
Based in Gainesville, Florida, Athena innovates breakthrough technologies that achieve the optimum balance of power, performance, and silicon area in a wide range of applications such as wireless, satellite, and secure communications. Athena provides patented semiconductor intellectual property (IP) solutions, with products ranging from the market-leading TeraFire® security cores, to Atomic DSP™ cores, and Atomic SDR™ software defined radio cores.

Athena was founded in 1986 and is privately held.

For more information, please visit www.athena-group.com.

Press Contact
Pat Rugg, VP Sales and Marketing
The Athena Group, Inc.
408 W. University Avenue, Suite 306
Gainesville, FL 32601
Phone: (352) 371-2567 ext. 307
Toll-free: (800) 741-7440
Email: pat.rugg@athena-group.com