Compact and Flexible Microcoded Elliptic Curve Processor for Reconfigurable Devices

This paper presents a very compact and flexible processor to support Elliptic Curve (EC) cryptosystems based on GF(2
^m
) finite fields. This processor can be customized with a two-level microinstruction hierarchy that allows for customization of both field operations and EC algorithms. It was specially designed to benefit from reconfiguration capabilities to scale arithmetic units for different sizes and to replicate processing units to enhance performance. The flexibility resulting from these characteristics was not found in the related art. The proposed processor was implemented and thoroughly tested in a Xilinx Virtex XC4VSX35, supporting a real EC algorithm for point multiplication for a GF(2
¹⁶³
) field, requiring 1.35 ms, and using up to 15 times less area than related implementations.