Digit-serial systolic multiplier for finite fields GF(2m)

A new digit-serial systolic array is proposed for computing multiplications in finite fields GF(2^m) with the standard basis representation. If input data come in continuously the proposed array can produce multiplication results at a rate of one every [m/L] clock cycles, where L is the selected digit size. Each cell of the array can be further pipelined so that the maximum propagation delay can be kept small to maintain a high clock rate when the digit size L gets large. The proposed architecture possesses the features of regularity, modularity, and unidirectional data flow. It is thus well suited to VLSI implementation with fault-tolerant design. As compared with existing bit-serial and bit-parallel multipliers for GF(2^m), the proposed digit-serial architecture gains an advantage in terms of improving the trade-off between throughput performance and hardware complexity