System integration of Elliptic Curve Cryptography on an OMAP platform

Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) is popular for digital signatures and other public-key crypto-applications in embedded contexts. However, ECC is computationally intensive, and in particular the performance of the underlying modular arithmetic remains a concern. We investigate the design space of ECC on TI´s OMAP 3530 platform, with a focus on using OMAP´s DSP core to accelerate ECC computations for the ARM Cortex A8 core. We examine the opportunities of the heterogeneous platform for efficient ECC, including the efficient implementation of the underlying field multiplication on the DSP, and the design partitioning to minimize the communications overhead between ARM and DSP. By migrating the computations to the DSP, we demonstrate a significant speedup for the underlying modular arithmetic with up to 9.24x reduction in execution time, compared to the implementation executing on the ARM Cortex processor. Prototype measurements show an energy reduction of up to 5.3 times. We conclude that a heterogeneous platform offers substantial improvements in performance and energy, but we also point out that the cost of inter-processor communication cannot be ignored.