Architectures for exponentiation in GF(2m)

Several VLSI architectures for performing exponentiation in GF(2 ^m) are presented. Two approaches to the architecture design are taken. In the first, all intermediate products of the exponentiation are computed in a sequential fashion to minimize the silicon area. In the second approach, all values of raised to the 2^ei power, O⩽i⩽m-1, are precomputed and stored so that the intermediate product terms can be calculated in a parallel fashion. For the two approaches, both synchronous and asynchronous implementations are presented using standard and normal bases. The discussion emphasizes the design and performance tradeoffs incurred in developing such architectures