Hifn (styled ''Hi/fn'') was a

semiconductor A semiconductor is a material which has an electrical resistivity and conductivity, electrical conductivity value falling between that of a electrical conductor, conductor, such as copper, and an insulator (electricity), insulator, such as glas ...

manufacturer founded in

Carlsbad, California Carlsbad is a coastal city in the North County region of San Diego County, California, United States. The city is south of downtown Los Angeles and north of downtown San Diego. As of the 2020 census, the population of the city was 114,746. ...

, in 1996 as a

corporate spin-off A corporate spin-off, also known as a spin-out, or starburst or hive-off, is a type of corporate action where a company "splits off" a section as a separate business or creates a second incarnation, even if the first is still active. Characte ...

from Stac Electronics. The company was later headquartered in

Los Gatos, California Los Gatos (, ; ) is an incorporated town in Santa Clara County, California, United States. The population is 33,529 according to the 2020 census. It is located in the San Francisco Bay Area just southwest of San Jose in the foothills of the ...

, and had offices in North America, Europe and Asia. It designed and sold security processors. It was acquired by Exar Corporation in 2009.

History

1996-2008: Founding and early years

Hifn was founded in 1996 as a spin-out of the semiconductor company Stac, Inc. It held its

initial public offering An initial public offering (IPO) or stock launch is a public offering in which shares of a company are sold to institutional investors and usually also to retail (individual) investors. An IPO is typically underwritten by one or more investment ...

in December 1998. The company's stock was traded on the

NASDAQ The Nasdaq Stock Market () (National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations Stock Market) is an American stock exchange based in New York City. It is the most active stock trading venue in the US by volume, and ranked second ...

under the symbol HIFN. In 1998, Hifn became the first company to offer a processor with integrated encryption and compression, following this in 1999 with the fastest security processor for

VPN A virtual private network (VPN) extends a private network across a public network and enables users to send and receive data across shared or public networks as if their computing devices were directly connected to the private network. The be ...

s. In 2000, Hifn announced an "Intelligent Packet Processor": a security co-processor capable of not only performing raw algorithm processing, but also modifying the complete packet, allowing their processors to transform an IP packet into an

IPSec In computing, Internet Protocol Security (IPsec) is a secure network protocol suite that authenticates and encrypts packets of data to provide secure encrypted communication between two computers over an Internet Protocol network. It is used in ...

packet in a single pass in the security processor, with only the policy and

IPsec In computing, Internet Protocol Security (IPsec) is a secure network protocol suite that authenticates and encrypts packets of data to provide secure encrypted communication between two computers over an Internet Protocol network. It is used in ...

stack being required on the host CPU. In 2001, the company announced a security processor featuring the

Advanced Encryption Standard The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), also known by its original name Rijndael (), is a specification for the encryption of electronic data established by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in 2001. AES is a variant ...

(AES) algorithm. In 2004 they followed on from their packet processor with an IPsec protocol processor, capable of performing IPsec and

Internet Key Exchange In computing, Internet Key Exchange (IKE, sometimes IKEv1 or IKEv2, depending on version) is the protocol used to set up a security association (SA) in the IPsec protocol suite. IKE builds upon the Oakley protocol and ISAKMP.The Internet Key Exch ...

processing with no CPU intervention. They also adapted this processor for the

storage area network A storage area network (SAN) or storage network is a computer network which provides access to consolidated, block-level data storage. SANs are primarily used to access data storage devices, such as disk arrays and tape libraries from serve ...

market, for applications such as

iSCSI Internet Small Computer Systems Interface or iSCSI ( ) is an Internet Protocol-based storage networking standard for linking data storage facilities. iSCSI provides block-level access to storage devices by carrying SCSI commands over a TCP/IP ...

. A secondary offering was priced on April 12, 2004. Hifn also offered security processors for secure

VoIP Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), also called IP telephony, is a method and group of technologies for the delivery of voice communications and multimedia sessions over Internet Protocol (IP) networks, such as the Internet. The terms Internet t ...

and

WiMax Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX) is a family of wireless broadband communication standards based on the IEEE 802.16 set of standards, which provide physical layer (PHY) and media access control (MAC) options. The WiMAX ...

applications, and marketed them for "application-aware" flow classifiers and search engines. In earlier 2004, Hifn acquired part of IBM Network Processor assets in addition to PowerNP's intellectual property license. Hifn became the sole vendor of PowerNP (IBM code: Rainier) to some telecom/datacom equipment manufacturers.

Acquisition by Exar

On April 3, 2009, semiconductor manufacturer Exar Corporation closed the acquisition of Hifn. The transaction included stock and about $67 million in cash.

Products

Hifn held the patents for the

Lempel–Ziv–Stac Lempel–Ziv–Stac (LZS, or Stac compression or Stacker compression) is a lossless data compression algorithm that uses a combination of the LZ77 sliding-window compression algorithm and fixed Huffman coding. It was originally developed by Stac ...

and

Microsoft Point-to-Point Compression Microsoft Point-to-Point Compression (MPPC; described in RFC 2118) is a streaming data compression algorithm based on an implementation of Lempel–Ziv using a sliding window buffer. According to Hifn's IP statement, MPPC was patent-encumbered (las ...

compression

algorithm In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm () is a finite sequence of rigorous instructions, typically used to solve a class of specific Computational problem, problems or to perform a computation. Algorithms are used as specificat ...

References

{{reflist Manufacturing companies established in 1996 Companies based in Silicon Valley Fabless semiconductor companies Defunct semiconductor companies of the United States