The IC design of a high speed RSA processor

Abstract

In this paper, we proposed a new algorithm based on Montgomery's algorithm[1] to calculate modular multiplication that is the core arithmetic operation in RSA cryptosystem. Since the critical path delay in modular multiplication operation is reduced the new design yields a very fast implementation. We have implemented a 512-bit single chip RSA processor based on our modified algorithm with Compass 0.6 mu n SPDM cell library. By our modified modular exponentiation algorithm if takes about 1.5n(2) clock cycles to finish one n-bit RSA modular exponentiation operation in our architecture. The simulation results show that we can operate up to 125Mhz, therefore the baud rate of our 512-bit RSA processor is about 164k bits/sec.