A versatile low-power ciphering and integrity protection unit for LTE-advanced mobile devices

In this paper we present a versatile hardware architecture for accelerating the Long Term Evolution (LTE) integrity protection and confidentiality algorithms based on SNOW3G and ZUC stream ciphers. The proposed design combines both ciphers in a unified configurable hardware accelerator unit and focuses on area and energy consumption reduction, by applying resource sharing and power optimization techniques. Hardware implementations base on Faraday´s 90 nm standard cell library and are evaluated at various timing constraints that account for data rates typical of LTE-Advanced mobile terminals. The unified architecture is compared to the stand-alone implementations, providing results that show an overall area reduction of 35% and a power saving of 40% and 75% for the confidentiality and integrity protection algorithms, respectively.