End-to-end encryption and reliability of the transmitted data are essential requirements in the present era of internet enabled smart devices. Adhering to current industry standards, the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) and Cyclic Redundancy Check (CRC) are the two most utilized methods for ensuring security and reliability. To integrate AES and CRC functionality in ultralow-power embedded System on Chips (SoCs), dedicated computation engines/co-processors are often used, consuming valuable silicon area and additional battery power. This paper presents the design of an energy-efficient multipurpose encryption engine capable of processing both AES and CRC algorithms using a shared Galois Field Computation Unit (GFCU). By decomposing the necessary Galois Field operations of AES and CRC to their fundamental binary steps, it was possible to identify shared operations in these two algorithms. This approach allowed the development of a resource shared system architecture capable of computing AES-128 and CRC-32 using a single computation unit. The GFCU based design was implemented in an area of 151μm x 151μm in 90nm technology node. The energy consumption of the design operating at 0.8 V supply voltage for a 25.6 Mbps throughput was less than 280pJ and 140pJ for AES-128 encryption and CRC-32, respectively.
Keywords: Energy efficient encryption; energy efficient computing; galois field; internet of things; sustainable computing.