A Low-Power Parallel Architecture for Finite Galois Field GF(2^m) Arithmetic Operations for Elliptic Curve Cryptography

In this paper, a parallel, power-efficient and scalable word-based crypto architecture is proposed that performs the operations required for scalar point multiplication including add, multiplication and inversion operations on GF(2^m) operands. The proposed architecture distinguishes itself from exiting architectures, including our prior architecture, by the fact that its resource usage and power-consumption is based on the input data. Hence, such architecture might be used for various operand sizes without modifying or reconfiguring the underlying hardware. Besides, the architecture has the ability to perform several different operations in parallel when each operation requires a small key size which significantly increases the overall performance and throughput of the system. In the absence of parallel requests, the remaining unused modules will be turned off in order to save power. The experimental results show significant improvement in the timing, throughput and energy performances with a slight overhead in the circuit area.