DRAB-LOCUS: An Area-Efficient AES Architecture for Hardware Accelerator Co-Location on FPGAs

TL;DR

This paper introduces DRAB-LOCUS, a resource-efficient FPGA architecture for AES encryption that significantly reduces FPGA resource usage while maintaining high throughput, enabling shared FPGA resource utilization for multiple functions.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel low-area AES architecture leveraging block RAM and DSP slices, achieving high throughput with 3x fewer resources than traditional designs.

Findings

Achieves 7.055 Gbps throughput with minimal FPGA resources.

Reduces resource usage by a factor of 3 compared to traditional AES implementations.

Uses only 909 LUTs, 593 Flip Flops, 16 block RAMs, and 18 DSP slices.

Abstract

Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) implementations on Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) commonly focus on maximizing throughput at the cost of utilizing high volumes of FPGA slice logic. High resource usage limits systems' abilities to implement other functions (such as video processing or machine learning) that may want to share the same FPGA resources. In this paper, we address the shared resource challenge by proposing and evaluating a low-area, but high-throughput, AES architecture. In contrast to existing work, our DSP/RAM-Based Low-CLB Usage (DRAB-LOCUS) architecture leverages block RAM tiles and Digital Signal Processing (DSP) slices to implement the AES Sub Bytes, Mix Columns, and Add Round Key sub-round transformations, reducing resource usage by a factor of 3 over traditional approaches. To achieve area-efficiency, we built an inner-pipelined architecture using the internal registers of block RAM tiles and DSP slices. Our DRAB-LOCUS architecture features a 12-stage pipeline capable of producing 7.055 Gbps of interleaved encrypted or decrypted data, and only uses 909 Look Up tables, 593 Flip Flops, 16 block RAMs, and 18 DSP slices in the target device.