A Polymorphic Finite Field Multiplier

Abstract

Cryptography algorithms like the Advanced Encryption Standard, Elliptic Curve Cryptography algorithms etc are designed using algebraic properties of finite fields. Thus performance of these algorithms depend on performance of the underneath field operations. Moreover, different algorithms use finite fields of widely varying order. In order to cater to these finite fields of different orders in an area efficient manner, it is necessary to design solutions in the form of hardware-consolidations, keeping the performance requirements in mind. Due to their small area occupancy and high utilization, such circuits are less likely to stay idle and therefore are less prone to loss of energy due to leakage power dissipation. There is another class of applications that rely on finite field algebra namely the various error detection and correction techniques. Most of the classical block codes used for detection of bit-error in communications over noisy communication channels apply the algebraic properties of finite fields. Cyclic redundancy check is one such algorithm used for detection of error in data in computer network. Reed-Solomon code is most notable among classical block codes because of its widespread use in storage devices like CD, DVD, HDD etc. In this work we present the architecture of a polymorphic multiplier for operations over various extensions of GF(2). We evolved the architecture of a textbook shift-and-add multiplier to arrive at the architecture of the polymorphic multiplier through a generalized mathematical formulation. The polymorphic multiplier is capable of morphing itself in runtime to create data-paths for multiplications of various orders. In order to optimally exploit the resources, we also introduced the capability of sub-word parallel execution in the polymorphic multiplier. The synthesis results of an instance of such a polymorphic multipliershowsabout41% savings in area with 21% degradation in maximum operating frequency compared to a collection of dedicated multipliers with equivalent functionality. We introduced the multiplier as an accelerator unit for field operations in the coarse grained runtime reconfigurable platform called REDEFINE. We observed about 40-50% improvement in performance of the AES algorithm and about 52×improvement in performance of Karatsuba-Ofman multiplication algorithm.