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.

While reading is fun, I’ve found playing around with Balsa, a high level opensource synthesis tool for asynchronous circuits, even more amusing. I’m also obliged to learn something about AES, so I’ve started to implement a naive AES-module in Balsa. My goal is to quickly make a big, power hungry, slow and correct implementation. I’ll publish my embarrassing code here when it’s somewhere near complete.

I have previously been interested in reed-solomon and raid6’s “magical” insides, and it seems that I’ve met my friend Galois field arethmitic again in the AES-algorithm. This blogpost shows a nice and tidy combinatorial implementation of multiplication in GF(8) with GPL3-licence. 10 xor + 1 and critical path isn’t bad for multiplication.

And then for some inspirational stuff from my favorite comic-writer xkcd: