%0 Journal Article
%T Dynamic Circuit Specialisation for Key-Based Encryption Algorithms and DNA Alignment
%A Tom Davidson
%A Fatma Abouelella
%A Karel Bruneel
%A Dirk Stroobandt
%J International Journal of Reconfigurable Computing
%D 2012
%I Hindawi Publishing Corporation
%R 10.1155/2012/716984
%X Parameterised reconfiguration is a method for dynamic circuit specialization on FPGAs. The main advantage of this new concept is the high resource efficiency. Additionally, there is an automated tool flow, TMAP, that converts a hardware design into a more resource-efficient run-time reconfigurable design without a large design effort. We will start by explaining the core principles behind the dynamic circuit specialization technique. Next, we show the possible gains in encryption applications using an AES encoder. Our AES design shows a 20.6% area gain compared to an unoptimized hardware implementation and a 5.3% gain compared to a manually optimized third-party hardware implementation. We also used TMAP on a Triple-DES and an RC6 implementation, where we achieve a 27.8% and a 72.7% LUT-area gain. In addition, we discuss a run-time reconfigurable DNA aligner. We focus on the optimizations to the dynamic specialization overhead. Our final design is up to 2.80-times more efficient on cheaper FPGAs than the original DNA aligner when at least one DNA sequence is longer than 758 characters. Most sequences in DNA alignment are of the order 213. 1. Introduction Parameterised configurations are a new concept for dynamic circuit specialization that uses FPGA reconfiguration. It was developed to use run-time reconfiguration (RTR) to dynamically specify the design [1]. This concept is implemented in the TMAP tool flow, an alternative to the normal FPGA tool flow. The TMAP tool flow allows us to automatically make a run-time reconfigurable design, based on the original design. Its principles and advantages are discussed in section 2. Because this is a new technique, there is still a lot of exploration needed to fully understand how it should be used and what the potential gains are for different applications. This paper shows that in at least two fields, key-based encryption and DNA alignment, substantial gains can be made using parameterised configurations. The TMAP tool flow allows us to check very quickly whether or not a certain implementation is suitable for dynamic circuit specialization or not. In Section 3 we will discuss the similarities between this tool flow and hardware/software partitioning that does not use run-time reconfiguration. There, we will also show that using parameterised configurations extends the hardware/software boundary. To explain how parameterised configuration can be used in encryption applications, we start with a straightforward implementation of the Advanced Encryption Standard. AES is an encryption algorithm detailed by the NIST
%U http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijrc/2012/716984/