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.