Efficient ASIC Implementation of a NB-IoT Security Co-processor

摘要

This work implements a hardware acceleration of selected confidentiality and integrity algorithms for Long Term Evolution (LTE) based on SNOW3G and ZUC stream ciphers. Structural similarities between both ciphers were utilized to combine a single configurable accelerator. Implementation is primarily optimized to cater for NB-IoT devices where lower resources considerations exist. Different implementation approaches are compared targeting a 130 nm technology resulting in an optimized hardware accelerator for 100 Mbps rate and utilizing cell area of 35.7 kGE. Maximum GDSII energy consumption after PnR is 1.74 pJ/bit. For the sake of comparison with current LTE cipher cores, the co-processor was characterized using a 65 nm technology at 2 Gbps rate achieving 47% area reduction for the cipher core without sacrificing average power consumption.