Scalable GF(p) Montgomery multiplier based on a digit–digit computation approach.

This study presents a scalable hardware architecture for modular multiplication in prime fields GF(p). A novel iterative digit–digit Montgomery multiplication (IDDMM) algorithm is proposed and two hardware architectures that compute that algorithm are described. The input operands (multiplicand, multiplier and modulus) are represented using as radix β = 2k. Multiplication over GF(p) is possible using almost the same hardware since the complexity of multiplier's kernel module depends mainly on k and not on p. The novel hardware architectures of GF(p) multipliers were evaluated on three Xilinx FPGA families. Design trade‐offs were analysed considering different operand sizes commonly used in cryptography and different digits sizes. The proposed designs for IDDMM are well suited to be implemented in modern FPGAs, making use of available dedicated multipliers and memory blocks reducing drastically the FPGA's standard logic while keeping an acceptable performance compared with other implementation approaches. From the Virtex5 implementation, the proposed MM multiplier reaches a throughput of 242 Mbps using only 219 FPGA slices and achieving a 1024‐bit modular multiplication in 4.21μs. This is 26 times less area resources than similar related works in the literature with an improved efficiency of 7x. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]