Efficient and High-Speed CGRA Accelerator for Cryptographic Applications

Efficient cryptographic hardware architectures must exhibit both high performance and flexibility to effectively meet the diverse demands of data security in multi-domain applications. However, current research faces challenges in achieving a balance between high processing speed and flexibility, leading to low hardware efficiency and limitations in applicability. Therefore, this paper proposes the ultra-efficient crypto-processor (UECP), a coarse-grained reconfigurable arrays (CGRA) accelerator designed to support various cryptographic algorithms, offering excellent performance and hardware efficiency. To significantly enhance performance and configuration efficiency, the UECP implements two optimal techniques: a 4x4 pipelined processing element array (PEA) and an effective configurable arithmetic logic unit (C-ALU). The performance evaluation of the UECP on the Xilinx ZCU102 FPGA at the system-on-chip level demonstrates a throughput ranging from 1.45 to 4.35 Gbps, power consumption of 0.357 W, and remarkable energy efficiency of 12.19 Gbps/W. The UECP on FPGA outperforms modern embedded CPUs such as ARM Cortex A53 and ARM Cortex A57 by 6.23-24.1 $\times$ in various algorithm computations. Moreover, when compared to current low-flexibility FPGA-based designs, the flexible UECP demonstrates a throughput superiority of 1.58- 10.71$\times$. Finally, the ASIC synthesis comparison results show that the UECP outperforms related works with 7.16-22$\times$ higher throughput, 7.92-22.5$\times$ better area efficiency, and 1.76-15.36$\times$ superior energy delay products (EDP).