Design, integration and implementation of crypto cores in an SoC environment

Purpose The paper aims to develop a systematic approach to design, integrate, and implement a set of crypto cores in a system-on-chip SoC) environment for data security applications. The advanced encryption standard (AES) and PRESENT block ciphers are deployed together, leading to a common crypto chip for performing encryption and decryption operations. Design/methodology/approach An integrated very large-scale integration (VLSI) architecture and its implementation for the AES and PRESENT ciphers is proposed. As per the choice, the architecture performs encryption or decryption operations for the selected cipher. Experimental results of the field-programmable gate array (FPGA) and application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) implementations and related design analysis are provided. Findings FPGA implementation of the architecture on Xilinx xc5vfx70t-1-ff1136 device consumes 19% slices, whereas the ASIC design is implemented in 180 nm complementary metal-oxide semiconductor ASIC technology that takes 1.0746 mm(2) of standard cell area and consumes 14.26 mW of power at 50 MHz clock frequency. A secure audio application using the designed architecture on an open source SoC environment is also provided. A test methodology for validation of the designed chip using an FPGA-based platform and tools is discussed. Originality/value The proposed architecture is compared with a set of existing hardware architectures for analyzing various design metrics such as latency, area, maximum operating frequency, power, and throughput.