Two Approaches for a Single-Chip FPGA Implementation of an Encryptor/Decryptor AES Core

Abstract

In this paper we present a single-chip FPGA full encryptor/decryptor core design of the AES algorithm. Our design performs all of them, encryption, decryption and key scheduling processes. High performance timing figures are obtained through the use of a pipelined architecture. Moreover, several modifications to the conventional AES algorithm’s formulations have been introduced, thus allowing us to obtain a significant reduction in the total number of computations and the path delay associated to them. Particularly, for the implementation of the most costly step of AES, multiplicative inverse in GF(2⁸), two approaches were considered. The first approach uses pre-computed values stored in a lookup table giving fast execution times of the algorithm at the price of memory requirements. Our second approach computes multiplicative inverse by using composite field techniques, yielding a reduction in the memory requirements at the cost of an increment in the execution time. The obtained results indicate that both designs are competitive with the fastest complete AES single-chip FGPA core implementations reported to date. Our first approach requires up to 11.8% less CLB slices, 21.5% less BRAMs and yields up to 18.5% higher throughput than the fastest comparable implementation reported in literature.