A Reconfigurable Multi-core Cryptoprocessor for Multi-channel Communication Systems

This paper presents a reconfigurable Multi-Core Crypto-Processor (MCCP) especially designed to secure multi-channel and multi-standard communication systems. Such component meets many constraints like high throughput and flexibility. In contrast, a classical mono-core approach either provides limited throughput or does not allow simple management of multi-channel streams. Nevertheless, parallelism is not sufficient for a multi-standard radio. It is therefore essential to increase MCCP flexibility. To achieve these results, our work takes advantage of the Xilinx FPGA hardware reconfiguration. The proposed MCCP can reach a maximum throughput of 1.7 Gbps at 190 MHz with several AES cipher modes. It uses about 4000 slices on a Virtex 4 FPGA.