IMCRYPTO: An In-Memory Computing Fabric for AES Encryption and Decryption

Abstract

This paper proposes IMCRYPTO, an in-memory computing (IMC) fabric for accelerating AES encryption and decryption. IMCRYPTO employs a unified structure to implement encryption and decryption in a single hardware architecture, with combined (Inv)SubBytes and (Inv)MixColumns steps. Because of this step-combination, as well as the high parallelism achieved by multiple units of random-access memory (RAM) and random-access/content-addressable memory (RA/CAM) arrays, IMCRYPTO achieves high throughput encryption and decryption without sacrificing area and power consumption. Additionally, due to the integration of a RISC-V core, IMCRYPTO offers programmability and flexibility. IMCRYPTO improves the throughput per area by a minimum (maximum) of 3.3x (223.1x) when compared to previous ASICs/IMC architectures for AES-128 encryption. Projections show added benefit from emerging technologies of up to 5.3x to the area-delay-power product of IMCRYPTO.