Exploiting multi-grained parallelism in reconfigurable SBC architectures

In recent years, reconfigurable technology has emerged as a popular choice for implementing various types of cryptographic functions. Nevertheless, an insufficient amount effort has been placed into fully exploiting the tremendous amounts of parallelism intrinsic to FPGAs for this class of algorithms. In this paper, we focus on block cipher architectures and explore design decisions that leverage the multi-grained parallelism inherent in many of these algorithms. We demonstrate the usefulness of this approach with a highly parallel FPGA implementation of the AES standard and present results detailing the area/delay tradeoffs resulting from our design decisions.