AES-RV: Hardware-Efficient RISC-V Accelerator with Low-Latency AES Instruction Extension for IoT Security

Abstract

The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is a widely adopted cryptographic algorithm essential for securing embedded systems and IoT platforms. However, existing AES hardware accelerators often face limitations in performance, energy efficiency, and flexibility. This paper presents AES-RV, a hardware-efficient RISC-V accelerator featuring low-latency AES instruction extensions optimized for real-time processing across all AES modes and key sizes. AES-RV integrates three key innovations: high-bandwidth internal buffers for continuous data processing, a specialized AES unit with custom low-latency instructions, and a pipelined system supported by a ping-pong memory transfer mechanism. Implemented on the Xilinx ZCU102 SoC FPGA, AES-RV achieves up to 255.97 times speedup and up to 453.04 times higher energy efficiency compared to baseline and conventional CPU/GPU platforms. It also demonstrates superior throughput and area efficiency against state-of-the-art AES accelerators, making it a strong candidate for secure and high-performance embedded systems.