A Highly Efficient Cipher Processor for Dual-Field Elliptic Curve Cryptography

This brief presents a high-throughput dual-field elliptic-curve-cryptography (ECC) processor that features all ECC functions with the programmable field and curve parameters over both the prime and binary fields. The proposed architecture is parallel and scalable. Using 0.13-mum CMOS technology, the core size of the processor is 1.44 mm² . The measured results show that our ECC processor can perform one 160-bit point scalar multiplication with coordinate conversion over the prime field in 608 mus at 121 MHz with only 70.0 mW and the binary field in 372 mus at 146 MHz with 82.1 mW. The ECC processor chip outperforms other ECC hardware designs in terms of functionality, scalability, performance, cost effectiveness, and power consumption. In addition, the system analysis shows that our design is very efficient, compared with the software implementation for realistic security applications.