Elixir: high-throughput cost-effective dual-field processors and the design framework for elliptic curve cryptography

  • Authors:
  • Jyu-Yuan Lai;Chih-Tsun Huang

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Computer Science, National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan;Department of Computer Science, National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

We present a design framework that consists of a high-throughput, parallel, and scalable elliptic curve cryptographic (ECC) processor, and its cost-effectiveness methodology for the design exploration. A two-phase scheduling methodology is proposed to optimize the ECC arithmetic over both GF(p) and GF(2m). Based on the methodology, a parallel and scalable ECC architecture is also proposed. Our dual-field ECC architecture supports arbitrary elliptic curves and arbitrary finite fields with different field sizes. The optimization to a variety of applications with different area/throughput requirements can be achieved rapidly and efficiently. Using 0.13-µm CMOS technology, a 160-bit ECC processor core is implemented, which can perform elliptic-curve scalar multiplication in 340 µs over GF(p) and 155 µs over GF(2m), respectively. The comparison of speed and area overhead among different ECC designs justifies the cost-effectiveness of the proposed ECC architecture with its design methodology.