High-speed pipelined ECC processor on FPGA

This paper details the design of a new high-speed pipelined elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) application specific instruction set processor (ASIP) using field programmable gate array (FPGA) technology. A six-stage pipeline has been applied to the design, and pipeline stalls are avoided via instruction reordering and data forwarding. Three complex instructions are introduced to reduce the latency by reducing the overall number of instructions. The new processor shows improvements over previously reported designs in terms of throughput, latency and area. The higher clock frequencies and low latencies lead to the fastest point multiplication time reported in the literature. An FPGA implementation over GF(2(163)) is shown, which achieves a point multiplication time of 36.77 microseconds at 77.01 MHz on a Xilinx Virtex-E device- over 50% faster than the best figure previously reported.