Comparison of Montgomery and Barrett modular multipliers on FPGAs

A diverse variety of algorithms and architectures for modular multiplication have been published. This paper concentrates on 2 algorithms, Montgomery and Barrett, and provides area and timing results for FPGA implementations of different architectures and wordlengths. The results show that techniques such as quotient pipelining and trivial quotient digit selection are not well suited to FPGA implementations, but that high-radix, separated modular multipliers perform well on this platform.