Extreme pipelining towards the best area-performance trade-off in hardware

Abstract

This paper presents a novel framework for the automatic pipelining of AES S-boxes using composite field representations. The framework is capable of finding positions to insert flip-flops in an almost optimal way, resulting in S-boxes with an almost optimal critical path. Our novel method is using memetic algorithms and is shown to be fast, reliable and successful. We demonstrate our framework for composite field S-boxes using a polynomial and a normal basis, respectively. Our results prove that this method should be consulted when an optimal solution is of interest. Besides experimental results with the new memetic algorithms, we also discuss the ideal model of a circuit, which can be used when assessing the quality of the obtained solutions. We emphasize that this method can be used for any circuit of interest and not only for AES S-boxes.