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

semiconductor A semiconductor is a material with electrical conductivity between that of a conductor and an insulator. Its conductivity can be modified by adding impurities (" doping") to its crystal structure. When two regions with different doping level ...

manufacturer founded in

Carlsbad, California Carlsbad is a beach city in the North County area of San Diego County, California, United States. The city is north of downtown San Diego and south of downtown Los Angeles. As of the 2020 United States census, 2020 census, the population of ...

, in 1996 as a

corporate spin-off A corporate spin-off, also known as a spin-out, 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. It is distinct ...

from

Stac Electronics Stac Electronics, originally incorporated as State of the Art Consulting and later shortened to Stac, Inc., was a technology company founded in 1983. It is known primarily for its Lempel–Ziv–Stac lossless compression algorithm and Stacker dis ...

. The company was later headquartered in

Los Gatos, California Los Gatos (; ; ) is an List of municipalities in California, incorporated town in Santa Clara County, California, United States. The population is 33,529 according to the 2020 United States census, 2020 census. It is located in the San Franc ...

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

Exar Corporation Exar Corporation was an American semiconductor manufacturer active from 1971 to 2017 as a subsidiary of the Japanese firm Rohm. It was acquired by MaxLinear Inc., MaxLinear in May 2017 and maintained as a wholly owned subsidiary for a short while ...

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 investm ...

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

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

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 Virtual private network (VPN) is a network architecture for virtually extending a private network (i.e. any computer network which is not the public Internet) across one or multiple other networks which are either untrusted (as they are not c ...

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 packet in a single pass in the security processor, with only the policy and IPsec 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, versioned as IKEv1 and IKEv2) 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 Exchange (IKE), RFC 2 ...

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 device, block-level data storage. SANs are primarily used to access Computer data storage, data storage devices, such as disk ...

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 known as IP telephony, is a set of technologies used primarily for voice communication sessions over Internet Protocol (IP) networks, such as the Internet. VoIP enables voice calls to be transmitted as ...

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 WiMA ...

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

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 (la ...

compression

algorithm In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm () is a finite sequence of Rigour#Mathematics, mathematically rigorous instructions, typically used to solve a class of specific Computational problem, problems or to perform a computation. Algo ...

References

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