Hardware Acceleration of the Advanced Encryption Standard on Field Programmable Gate Arrays

International Journal of Computer Science and Technology | Vol. 7, No. 11, November 2005 | pp. 81–88

DOI: 10.46882/2005/IJCST/071114

Research Article

Title: Hardware Acceleration of the Advanced Encryption Standard on Field Programmable Gate Arrays

Names of Authors: Klaus Meyer¹, Priya Nair²

Authors’ Affiliations: ¹Institute for Computer Engineering, University of Heidelberg, Heidelberg, Germany; ²Department of Electronics Engineering, Cochin University of Science and Technology, Kochi, India

Abstract:
Software implementations of complex symmetric ciphers often introduce throughput bottlenecks in high-speed network gateways. This paper evaluates an optimized hardware architecture for the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) with a 128-bit key size on Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). The proposed core achieves high performance by unrolling the internal cipher loop and using a fully pipelined structure divided into four inner stages. S-box operations are mapped onto dedicated on-chip block RAM units to bypass combinational logic path delays. The design was synthesized on a Xilinx Virtex-4 FPGA device, utilizing 2,450 look-up tables (LUTs) and 10 block RAMs. Operating at a maximum clock frequency of f = 285 MHz, the hardware accelerator achieved a steady-state encryption throughput of 36.48 Gbps. This performance baseline represents a 42.5% speedup over conventional loop-iterative hardware architectures, making it suitable for line-rate bulk encryption in Gigabit Ethernet networks.

Keywords: Hardware Acceleration, Advanced Encryption Standard, FPGA, Pipelined Architecture, Cryptography

Manuscript Timeline: Received August 11, 2005; Revised September 24, 2005; Accepted October 15, 2005; Published November 22, 2005

Citation: Meyer, K., & Nair, P. (2005). Hardware Acceleration of the Advanced Encryption Standard on Field Programmable Gate Arrays. International Journal of Computer Science and Technology, 7(11), 81–88.

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