Design of transport triggered architecture processors for wireless encryption

Transport triggered architecture (TTA) offers a cost-effective trade-off between the size and performance of ASICs and the programmability of general-purpose processors. In this paper TTA processors for the RC4 and AES encryption algorithms of the new IEEE 802.11i WLAN security standard are designed. Special operations efficiently supporting the ciphers are developed. The TTA design flow is utilized for finding configurations with the best performance-size ratios. The size of the configuration supporting both the algorithms is 69.4 kgates and the throughput 100 Mb/s for RC4 and 68.5 Mb/s for AES at 100 MHz in the 0.13 μm CMOS technology. Compared to commercial processors of the same wireless application domain, higher throughputs are achieved at significantly smaller area and lower clock speed, which also results in decreased energy consumption.