Novel high throughput implementation of SHA-256 hash function through pre-computation technique

Hash functions are utilized in the security layer of every communication protocol and in signature authentication schemes for electronic transactions. As time passes more sophisticated applications-that invoke a security layer-arise and address to more users-clients. This means that all these applications demand for higher throughput. In this work a pre-computation technique has been developed for optimizing SHA-256 which has already started replacing both SHA-1 and MD-5. Comparing to conventional pipelined implementations of SHA-256 hash function the applied pre-computation technique leads to about 30% higher throughput with only an area penalty of approximately 9.5%.