FPGA implementation and performance evaluation of a high throughput crypto coprocessor

This paper describes the FPGA implementation of FastCrypto, which extends a general-purpose processor with a crypto coprocessor for encrypting/decrypting data. Moreover, it studies the trade-offs between FastCrypto performance and design parameters, including the number of stages per round, the number of parallel Advance Encryption Standard (AES) pipelines, and the size of the queues. Besides, it shows the effect of memory latency on the FastCrypto performance. FastCrypto is implemented with VHDL programming language on Xilinx Virtex V FPGA. A throughput of 222 Gb/s at 444 MHz can be achieved on four parallel AES pipelines. To reduce the power consumption, the frequency of four parallel AES pipelines is reduced to 100 MHz while the other components are running at 400 MHz. In this case, our results show a FastCrypto performance of 61.725 bits per clock cycle (b/cc) when 128-bit single-port L2 cache memory is used. However, increasing the memory bus width to 256-bit or using 128-bit dual-port memory, improves the performance to 112.5 b/cc (45 Gb/s at 400 MHz), which represents 88% of the ideal performance (128 b/cc).

► We implement FastCrypto with VHDL on Xilinx Virtex V FPGA.
► We study trade-offs between FastCrypto performance and design parameters.
► We show the effect of memory latency on the FastCrypto performance.
► FastCrypto throughput depends on the number of AES pipelines and memory bandwidth.
► Increasing memory bus width or read/write ports improves the FastCrypto performance.