Comparison of Hand-Written RTL code against High-Level Synthesis for Blowfish and Tiny Encrpytion Algorithm (TEA)

Abstract

Cryptography is the backbone of a secure and reliable communication system. Data security while transmission depends upon the strength of cryptographic algorithm. In this work, Tiny Encryption Algorithms (TEA) and Blowfish algorithms has been implemented using the High Level Synthesis (HLS) and hand-written Register Transfer Level (RTL) approaches in Xilinx Vivado HLS and Xilinx ISE. Comparative evaluation for both implementation approaches has shown that RTL approach is outperforming HLS approach in both algorithms for different parameters like throughput, frequency etc., due to flexibility of designing modules in RTL as compared to HLS approach