A VLSI synthesis of a Reed-Solomon processor for digital communication systems

The Reed-Solomon codes have been widely used in digital communication systems such as computer networks, satellites, VCRs, mobile communications and high- definition television (HDTV), in order to protect digital data against erasures, random and burst errors during transmission. Since the encoding and decoding algorithms for such codes are computationally intensive, special purpose hardware implementations are often required to meet the real time requirements. -- One motivation for this thesis is to investigate and introduce reconfigurable Galois field arithmetic structures which exploit the symmetric properties of available architectures. Another is to design and implement an RS encoder/decoder ASIC which can support a wide family of RS codes. -- An m-programmable Galois field multiplier which uses the standard basis representation of the elements is first introduced. It is then demonstrated that the exponentiator can be used to implement a fast inverter which outperforms the available inverters in GF(2m). Using these basic structures, an ASIC design and synthesis of a reconfigurable Reed-Solomon encoder/decoder processor which implements a large family of RS codes is proposed. The design is parameterized in terms of the block length n, Galois field symbol size m, and error correction capability t for the various RS codes. The design has been captured using the VHDL hardware description language and mapped onto CMOS standard cells available in the 0.8-µm BiCMOS design kits for Cadence and Synopsys tools. The experimental chip contains 218,206 logic gates and supports values of the Galois field symbol size m = 3,4,5,6,7,8 and error correction capability t = 1,2,3, ..., 16. Thus, the block length n is variable from 7 to 255. Error correction t and Galois field symbol size m are pin-selectable. -- Since low design complexity and high throughput are desired in the VLSI chip, the algebraic decoding technique has been investigated instead of the time or transform domain. The encoder uses a self-reciprocal generator polynomial which structures the codewords in a systematic form. At the beginning of the decoding process, received words are initially stored in the first-in-first-out (FIFO) buffer as they enter the syndrome module. The Berlekemp-Massey algorithm is used to determine both the error locator and error evaluator polynomials. The Chien Search and Forney's algorithms operate sequentially to solve for the error locations and error values respectively. The error values are exclusive or-ed with the buffered messages in order to correct the errors, as the processed data leave the chip

Bit-parallel word-serial polynomial basis finite field multiplier in GF(2(233)).

Smart card gains extensive uses as a cryptographic hardware in security applications in daily life. The characteristics of smart card require that the cryptographic hardware inside the smart card have the trade-off between area and speed. There are two main public key cryptosystems, these are RSA cryptosystem and elliptic curve (EC) cryptosystem. EC has many advantages compared with RSA such as shorter key length and more suitable for VLSI implementation. Such advantages make EC an ideal candidate for smart card. Finite field multiplier is the key component in EC hardware. In this thesis, bit-parallel word-serial (BPWS) polynomial basis (PB) finite field multipliers are designed. Such architectures trade-off area with speed and are very useful for smart card. An ASIC chip which can perform finite field multiplication and finite field squaring using the BPWS PB finite field multiplier is designed in this thesis. The proposed circuit has been implemented using TSMC 0.18 CMOS technology. A novel 8 x 233 bit-parallel partial product generator is also designed. This new partial product generator has low circuit complexity. The design algorithm can be easily extended to w x m bit-parallel partial product generator for GF(2m).Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Paper copy at Leddy Library: Theses & Major Papers - Basement, West Bldg. / Call Number: Thesis2004 .T36. Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 43-01, page: 0286. Advisers: H. Wu; M. Ahmadi. Thesis (M.A.Sc.)--University of Windsor (Canada), 2004

Bit Serial Systolic Architectures for Multiplicative Inversion and Division over GF(2^m)

Systolic architectures are capable of achieving high throughput by maximizing pipelining and by eliminating global data interconnects. Recursive algorithms with regular data flows are suitable for systolization. The computation of multiplicative inversion using algorithms based on EEA (Extended Euclidean Algorithm) are particularly suitable for systolization. Implementations based on EEA present a high degree of parallelism and pipelinability at bit level which can be easily optimized to achieve local data flow and to eliminate the global interconnects which represent most important bottleneck in todays sub-micron design process. The net result is to have high clock rate and performance based on efficient systolic architectures. This thesis examines high performance but also scalable implementations of multiplicative inversion or field division over Galois fields GF(2m) in the specific case of cryptographic applications where field dimension m may be very large (greater than 400) and either m or defining irreducible polynomial may vary. For this purpose, many inversion schemes with different basis representation are studied and most importantly variants of EEA and binary (Stein's) GCD computation implementations are reviewed. A set of common as well as contrasting characteristics of these variants are discussed. As a result a generalized and optimized variant of EEA is proposed which can compute division, and multiplicative inversion as its subset, with divisor in either polynomial or triangular basis representation. Further results regarding Hankel matrix formation for double-basis inversion is provided. The validity of using the same architecture to compute field division with polynomial or triangular basis representation is proved. Next, a scalable unidirectional bit serial systolic array implementation of this proposed variant of EEA is implemented. Its complexity measures are defined and these are compared against the best known architectures. It is shown that assuming the requirements specified above, this proposed architecture may achieve a higher clock rate performance w. r. t. other designs while being more flexible, reliable and with minimum number of inter-cell interconnects. The main contribution at system level architecture is the substitution of all counter or adder/subtractor elements with a simpler distributed and free of carry propagation delays structure. Further a novel restoring mechanism for result sequences of EEA is proposed using a double delay element implementation. Finally, using this systolic architecture a CMD (Combined Multiplier Divider) datapath is designed which is used as the core of a novel systolic elliptic curve processor. This EC processor uses affine coordinates to compute scalar point multiplication which results in having a very small control unit and negligible with respect to the datapath for all practical values of m. The throughput of this EC based on this bit serial systolic architecture is comparable with designs many times larger than itself reported previously

Concurrent Error Detection in Finite Field Arithmetic Operations

With significant advances in wired and wireless technologies and also increased shrinking in the size of VLSI circuits, many devices have become very large because they need to contain several large units. This large number of gates and in turn large number of transistors causes the devices to be more prone to faults. These faults specially in sensitive and critical applications may cause serious failures and hence should be avoided. On the other hand, some critical applications such as cryptosystems may also be prone to deliberately injected faults by malicious attackers. Some of these faults can produce erroneous results that can reveal some important secret information of the cryptosystems. Furthermore, yield factor improvement is always an important issue in VLSI design and fabrication processes. Digital systems such as cryptosystems and digital signal processors usually contain finite field operations. Therefore, error detection and correction of such operations have become an important issue recently. In most of the work reported so far, error detection and correction are applied using redundancies in space (hardware), time, and/or information (coding theory). In this work, schemes based on these redundancies are presented to detect errors in important finite field arithmetic operations resulting from hardware faults. Finite fields are used in a number of practical cryptosystems and channel encoders/decoders. The schemes presented here can detect errors in arithmetic operations of finite fields represented in different bases, including polynomial, dual and/or normal basis, and implemented in various architectures, including bit-serial, bit-parallel and/or systolic arrays

Novel Single and Hybrid Finite Field Multipliers over GF(2m) for Emerging Cryptographic Systems

With the rapid development of economic and technical progress, designers and users of various kinds of ICs and emerging embedded systems like body-embedded chips and wearable devices are increasingly facing security issues. All of these demands from customers push the cryptographic systems to be faster, more efficient, more reliable and safer. On the other hand, multiplier over GF(2m) as the most important part of these emerging cryptographic systems, is expected to be high-throughput, low-complexity, and low-latency. Fortunately, very large scale integration (VLSI) digital signal processing techniques offer great facilities to design efficient multipliers over GF(2m). This dissertation focuses on designing novel VLSI implementation of high-throughput low-latency and low-complexity single and hybrid finite field multipliers over GF(2m) for emerging cryptographic systems. Low-latency (latency can be chosen without any restriction) high-speed pentanomial basis multipliers are presented. For the first time, the dissertation also develops three high-throughput digit-serial multipliers based on pentanomials. Then a novel realization of digit-level implementation of multipliers based on redundant basis is introduced. Finally, single and hybrid reordered normal basis bit-level and digit-level high-throughput multipliers are presented. To the authors knowledge, this is the first time ever reported on multipliers with multiple throughput rate choices. All the proposed designs are simple and modular, therefore suitable for VLSI implementation for various emerging cryptographic systems

High Speed and Low-Complexity Hardware Architectures for Elliptic Curve-Based Crypto-Processors

The elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) has been identified as an efficient scheme for public-key cryptography. This thesis studies efficient implementation of ECC crypto-processors on hardware platforms in a bottom-up approach. We first study efficient and low-complexity architectures for finite field multiplications over Gaussian normal basis (GNB). We propose three new low-complexity digit-level architectures for finite field multiplication. Architectures are modified in order to make them more suitable for hardware implementations specially focusing on reducing the area usage. Then, for the first time, we propose a hybrid digit-level multiplier architecture which performs two multiplications together (double-multiplication) with the same number of clock cycles required as the one for one multiplication. We propose a new hardware architecture for point multiplication on newly introduced binary Edwards and generalized Hessian curves. We investigate higher level parallelization and lower level scheduling for point multiplication on these curves. Also, we propose a highly parallel architecture for point multiplication on Koblitz curves by modifying the addition formulation. Several FPGA implementations exploiting these modifications are presented in this thesis. We employed the proposed hybrid multiplier architecture to reduce the latency of point multiplication in ECC crypto-processors as well as the double-exponentiation. This scheme is the first known method to increase the speed of point multiplication whenever parallelization fails due to the data dependencies amongst lower level arithmetic computations. Our comparison results show that our proposed multiplier architectures outperform the counterparts available in the literature. Furthermore, fast computation of point multiplication on different binary elliptic curves is achieved

New bit-parallel Montgomery multiplier for trinomials using squaring operation

In this paper, a new bit-parallel Montgomery multiplier for $GF(2^m)$ is presented, where the field is generated with an irreducible trinomial. We first present a slightly generalized version of a newly proposed divide and conquer approach. Then, by combining this approach and a carefully chosen Montgomery factor, the Montgomery multiplication can be transformed into a composition of small polynomial multiplications and Montgomery squarings, which are simpler and more efficient. Explicit complexity formulae in terms of gate counts and time delay of our architecture are investigated. As a result, the proposed multiplier has generally 25\% lower space complexity than the fastest multipliers, with time complexity as good as or better than previous Karatsuba-based multipliers for the same class of fields. Among the five irreducible polynomials recommended by NIST for the ECDSA (Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm), there are two trinomials which are available for our architecture. We show that our proposal outperforms the previous best known results if the space and time complexity are both considered

Multiple bit error correcting architectures over finite fields

This thesis proposes techniques to mitigate multiple bit errors in GF arithmetic circuits. As GF arithmetic circuits such as multipliers constitute the complex and important functional unit of a crypto-processor, making them fault tolerant will improve the reliability of circuits that are employed in safety applications and the errors may cause catastrophe if not mitigated. Firstly, a thorough literature review has been carried out. The merits of efficient schemes are carefully analyzed to study the space for improvement in error correction, area and power consumption. Proposed error correction schemes include bit parallel ones using optimized BCH codes that are useful in applications where power and area are not prime concerns. The scheme is also extended to dynamically correcting scheme to reduce decoder delay. Other method that suits low power and area applications such as RFIDs and smart cards using cross parity codes is also proposed. The experimental evaluation shows that the proposed techniques can mitigate single and multiple bit errors with wider error coverage compared to existing methods with lesser area and power consumption. The proposed scheme is used to mask the errors appearing at the output of the circuit irrespective of their cause. This thesis also investigates the error mitigation schemes in emerging technologies (QCA, CNTFET) to compare area, power and delay with existing CMOS equivalent. Though the proposed novel multiple error correcting techniques can not ensure 100% error mitigation, inclusion of these techniques to actual design can improve the reliability of the circuits or increase the difficulty in hacking crypto-devices. Proposed schemes can also be extended to non GF digital circuits

Fast Modular Reduction for Large-Integer Multiplication

The work contained in this thesis is a representation of the successful attempt to speed-up the modular reduction as an independent step of modular multiplication, which is the central operation in public-key cryptosystems. Based on the properties of Mersenne and Quasi-Mersenne primes, four distinct sets of moduli have been described, which are responsible for converting the single-precision multiplication prevalent in many of today\u27s techniques into an addition operation and a few simple shift operations. A novel algorithm has been proposed for modular folding. With the backing of the special moduli sets, the proposed algorithm is shown to outperform (speed-wise) the Modified Barrett algorithm by 80% for operands of length 700 bits, the least speed-up being around 70% for smaller operands, in the range of around 100 bits