A Highly Efficient, Modular and Portable FPGA Implementation of AES Cryptography

Abstract

This article describes the core implementation of an Advanced Encryption Standard - AES in Field Programmable Gate Array - FPGA. The core was implemented in both Xilinx Spartan-3 and Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGAs. The algorithm was implemented for 128 bits word and key. The implementation was very efficient, achieving 318MHz on a Xilinx Spartan-3, representing at 50% faster than other reported works. The implementation can achieve 800MHz on a Xilinx Virtex-5. The main goal of this work was the implementation of a fast and modular AES algorithm, as it can be easily reconfigured to 128, 196 or 256 bits key, and can find a wide range of applications. Nevertheless, all the reported works used as comparison basis to our work were also implemented using 128 bits key.