A Compact FPGA Implementation of the SHA-3 Candidate ECHO

Abstract

We propose a compact architecture of the SHA-3 candidate ECHO for the Virtex-5 FPGA family. Our architecture is built around a 8-bit datapath. We show that a careful organization of the chaining variable and the message block in the register file allows one to design a compact control unit based on a 4-bit counter, an 8-bit counter, and a simple Finite State Machine. A fully autonomous implementation of ECHO on a Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGA requires $127$ slices and a single memory block to store the internal state, and achieves a throughput of $72$Mbps