A Fully Pipelined High-Performance Elliptic Curve Cryptography Processor for NIST P-256.

Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) is widely used in public key encryption, but its high-speed deployment faces challenges due to algorithmic and arithmetic complexity. In this paper, we present a high-performance ECC processor for the elliptic curve point multiplication (ECPM) of NIST P-256. Our approach employs a fully pipelined architecture featuring a 7-stage, 256-bit multiplier operating at a high frequency. To manage the data flow of the ECPM operation process, we devise a controller equipped with configurable instructions, which provides ECPM operations with higher flexibility to meet diverse contextual requirements. Additionally, we introduce a compact pipeline schedule to reduce ECPM computation clock cycles. The proposed LUT-based design achieves ECPM computation in 0.039 ms on FPGA (Virtex-7 platform) and 0.037 ms on ASIC (90nm technology), requiring only 10712 clock cycles.