High Level Modeling of AES in QCA Technology

Lent has created QCA nanoscale devices by merging the cellular automata and quantum electronics. These devices are capable of achieving very high switching speeds and very low electrical power consumption. AES block cipher is now used worldwide. This algorithm is based on the Rijndael cipher which was submitted as a proposal to NIST during the AES selection process. The implementation of this cryptographic algorithm in QCA technology is presented in this paper. On the other hand, the QCADesigner software which is used to simulate QCA circuits is sensitive to the QCA cell count, inputs and outputs. It seems that by increasing the QCA cell count, inputs and outputs, the simulation time will increase and sometimes the simulation will be impossible. A higher level modeling of QCA circuits by VHDL hardware description language and simulation of these models by ModelSim software is presented in this paper to solve the mentioned problem. It is shown that the QCA implementation of the AES algorithm with key, input and output length of 128 bits is easily modeled and simulated in ModelSim software. The implementation results of various implementation methods are also compared in this paper for AES algorithm. It is illustrated that the QCA implementation of this algorithm is the most efficient implementation among existing methods.