Low Complexity Systolic Montgomery Multiplication over Finite Fields GF(2m)

Galois field arithmetic is important in error correcting codes and public-key cryptography schemes. Hardware realization of these schemes requires an efficient implementation of Galois field arithmetic operations. Multiplication is the main finite field operation and designing efficient multiplier can clearly affect the performance of compute-intensive applications. Diverse algorithms and hardware architectures are presented in the literature for hardware realization of Galois field multiplication to acquire a reduction in time and area. This paper presents a low complexity semi-systolic multiplier to facilitate parallel processing by partitioning Montgomery modular multiplication (MMM) into two independent and identical units and two-level systolic computation scheme. Analytical results indicate that the proposed multiplier achieves lower area-time (AT) complexity compared to related multipliers. Moreover, the proposed method has regularity, concurrency, and modularity, and thus is well suited for VLSI implementation. It can be applied as a core circuit for multiplication and division/exponentiation.