A Scalable Digit-Parallel Polynomial Multiplier Architecture for NIST-Standardized Binary Elliptic Curves

Abstract

This work presents a scalable digit-parallel finite field polynomial multiplier architecture with a digit size of 32 bits for NIST-standardized binary elliptic fields. First, a dedicated digit-parallel architecture is proposed for each binary field recommended by NIST, i.e., 163, 233, 283, 409 and 571. Then, a scalable architecture having support for all variants of binary fields of elliptic curves is proposed. For performance investigation, we have compared dedicated multiplier architectures with scalable design. After this, the dedicated and scalable architectures are compared with the most relevant state-of-the-art multipliers. All multiplier architectures are implemented in Verilog HDL using the Vivado IDE tool. The implementation results are reported on a 28 nm Virtex-7 FPGA technology. The dedicated multipliers utilize slices of 1182 (for m=163), 1451 (for m=233), 1589 (for m=283), 2093 (for m=409) and 3451 (for m=571). Moreover, our dedicated designs can operate at a maximum frequency of 500, 476, 465, 451 and 443 MHz. Similarly, for all supported binary fields, our scalable architecture (i) utilizes 3753 slices, (ii) achieves 305 MHz clock frequency, (iii) takes 0.013 μs for one finite field multiplication and (iv) consumes 3.905 W power. The proposed scalable digit-parallel architecture is more area-efficient than most recent state-of-the-art multipliers. Consequently, the reported results and comparison to the state of the art reveal that the proposed architectures are well suited for cryptographic applications.