Hardware software tri-design of encryption for mobile communication units

We explore the design space of field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), processors and ASICs-hardware-software tri-design-in the framework of encryption for hand-held communication units. The IDEA (International Data Encryption Algorithm) is used to show the tradeoffs for the suggested technologies. The measures for comparing different options are: performance, programmability and power (P/sup 3/). More specifically we use the performance to power, or operations to energy ratio MOPS/Watt and Mbits/s/Watt to compare processors, FPGAs and ASICs. We compare the latest digital signal processor (DSP) from Texas Instruments to Xilinx XC4000 series FPGAs. Many DSP-like applications perform very well on FPGAs. We show the benefits and limitations of FPGA technology for IDEA.