This paper presents a throughput/area-efficient hardware accelerator architecture for elliptic curve point multiplication (ECPM) computation over GF(2233). The throughput of the proposed accelerator design is optimized by reducing the total clock cycles using a bit-parallel Karatsuba modular multiplier. We employ two techniques to minimize the hardware resources: (i) a consolidated arithmetic unit where we combine a single modular adder, multiplier, and square block instead of having multiple modular operators, and (ii) an Itoh–Tsujii inversion algorithm by leveraging the existing hardware resources of the multiplier and square units for multiplicative inverse computation.
An efficient finite-state-machine (FSM) controller is implemented to facilitate control functionalities. To evaluate and compare the results of the proposed accelerator architecture against state-of-the-art solutions, a figure-of-merit (FoM) metric in terms of throughput/area is defined. The implementation results after post-place-and-route simulation are reported for reconfigurable field-programmable gate array (FPGA) devices. Particular to Virtex-7 FPGA, the accelerator utilizes 3584 slices, needs 7208 clock
cycles, operates on a maximum frequency of 350 MHz, computes one ECPM operation in 20.59 s, and the calculated value of FoM is 13.54. Consequently, the results and comparisons reveal that our accelerator suits applications that demand throughput and area-optimized ECPM implementations.
