Comparative analysis of different AES implementation techniques for efficient resource usage and better performance of an FPGA

Over the past few years, cryptographic algorithms have become increasingly important. Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) algorithm was introduced in early 2000. It is widely adopted because of its easy implementation and robust security. In this work, AES is implemented on FPGA using five different techniques. These techniques are based on optimized implementation of AES on FPGA by making efficient resource usage of the target device. Experimental results obtained are quite varying in nature. They range from smallest (suitable for area critical application) to fastest (suitable for performance critical applications) implementation. Finally, technique making efficient usage of resources leads to frequency of 886.64 MHz and throughput of 113.5 Gb/s with moderate resource consumption on a Spartan-6 device. Furthermore, comparison between proposed technique and existing work shows that our technique has 32% higher frequency, while consuming 2.63× more slice LUTs, 8.33× less slice registers, and 12.59× less LUT-FF pairs.