Options and decisions

Should i pipeline s-boxes?

The more you look at problems, the more options do you see. Some time ago I would mostly try to find “solutions”, now I often find the process at least as interesting. So, I would like to document my options as I see them today, so that I can laugh at my own ignorance (or genious, in that case it should be appropriate with evil laughter) in a year or so in the future. And it is material for my report: “First I thought this, but surprisingly I found this.”

It works

Logic mechanics (picture from wikipedia)

It’s ugly, it’s big, it’s slow, but it is asynchronous. Here it is. It’s not verified, but validated for some example input. It instantiates 4*16 8-bit galois-field multiplicators, 16 sboxes and then some. It’s all mostly parallel, though.

Animation

Well, my AES-module doesn’t quite work yet, but it compiles and looks great as you can see in the video. To make it work, I at least have to xor in Rcon in the key schedule.

The animation shows the handshaking, which is the key to designing clockless circuits. As you can see, there are four colors involved, as it uses four phase handshake:

Hello world

I have to start somewhere, so here I go.

The idea of blogging about my thesis came from my work in Altund, a group for promoting education methods at NTNU which lead my focus to the conference Hitech-Lotech, and two architect students who had good experience with blogging about their master thesis work in their blog “Ready. Set. Go back!“.

Now, while I formally haven’t got my assignment yet, I’ve anyway started to read up on what I hope I’ll get: Clockless design of an AES-circuit.