IMCRYPTO: An In-Memory Computing Fabric for AES Encryption and Decryption

TL;DR

IMCRYPTO is a high-throughput, energy-efficient in-memory computing fabric that accelerates AES encryption and decryption by combining steps and leveraging parallel RAM/RA-CAM arrays, with added programmability via a RISC-V core.

Contribution

The paper introduces IMCRYPTO, a unified in-memory computing architecture for AES that combines encryption and decryption steps, achieving significant improvements in throughput and efficiency.

Findings

Achieves 3.3x to 223.1x higher throughput per area compared to previous architectures.

Supports programmable AES operations with an integrated RISC-V core.

Potential for up to 5.3x improvements using emerging technologies.

Abstract

This paper proposes IMCRYPTO, an in-memory computing (IMC) fabric for accelerating AES encryption and decryption. IMCRYPTO employs a unified structure to implement encryption and decryption in a single hardware architecture, with combined (Inv)SubBytes and (Inv)MixColumns steps. Because of this step-combination, as well as the high parallelism achieved by multiple units of random-access memory (RAM) and random-access/content-addressable memory (RA/CAM) arrays, IMCRYPTO achieves high throughput encryption and decryption without sacrificing area and power consumption. Additionally, due to the integration of a RISC-V core, IMCRYPTO offers programmability and flexibility. IMCRYPTO improves the throughput per area by a minimum (maximum) of 3.3x (223.1x) when compared to previous ASICs/IMC architectures for AES-128 encryption. Projections show added benefit from emerging technologies of up to 5.3x to the area-delay-power product of IMCRYPTO.