A Novel Unified Modular Arithmetic Unit for Elliptic Curve Cryptography

Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) is widely used in asymmetric cryptographic systems. The efficiency of an ECC processor highly depends on its modular arithmetic units responsible for modular multiplications, additions, and subtractions. Previous ECC processor designs perform these modular operations in separate modules and may lead to low hardware utilization efficiency. In this paper, we propose a novel modular arithmetic unit that implements all the required modular arithmetic operations in one unified module and can perform all the operations in a highly-efficient manner. As a result, this design can greatly enhance the performance of an ECC processor with very low hardware complexity. Experimental results show that this design achieves the lowest area-time product and the highest operating frequency compared to the currently available modular multipliers, even though there are additional functions in the proposed design.