Pre-silicon prototyping of a unified hardware architecture for cryptographic manipulation detection codes

Engineers developing complex embedded SoC designs are increasingly finding that traditional verification techniques are inadequate for delivering bug-free first pass silicon. The design community is turning to pre-silicon prototypes built from FPGA devices as a technique for meeting such challenges. We propose 'HashChip' and implement a strategy for its pre-silicon prototyping. The 'HashChip' is a hardware architecture aimed at providing a unified solution for three different cryptographic manipulation detection codes extensively used in the field of network security, namely, MD5, SHAI and RIPEMD160. Prototyping is attempted on a wide variety of FPGAs prior to ASIC implementation and the performance of the architecture is analyzed.