Reconfigurable solutions for very-long arithmetic with applications in cryptography

ABSTRACT

We present a cryptography-oriented reconfigurable array called CryptoRA that efficiently supports very long-integer addition and subtraction. We first describe the CryptoRA architecture and show that extending the dedicated carry chains of modern FPGAs over the orthogonal direction, followed by merging two FPGA columns to create computing tiles that support both generate and propagate signals of a carry-lookahead network, provides a reduction in operation latency. Then, we show that splitting a tile's Look-Up Table into two halves provides additional benefits in terms of latency and flexibility in using the dedicated generate and propagate chains. According to our estimations, long-integer addition widely used in cryptography is more than 22% faster on CryptoRA than on Virtex-II Pro FPGA. This improvement has a large positive impact on implementing cryptography applications in embedded environments.

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Index Terms

• Hardware

  • Electronic design automation

    • Physical design (EDA)

      • Placement

      • Wire routing

  • Integrated circuits

    • Logic circuits

      • Arithmetic and datapath circuits

  • Robustness

    • Design for manufacturability

      • Yield and cost modeling

      • Yield and cost optimization

  • Very large scale integration design

    • Application-specific VLSI designs