Hardware and Software Architecture for Accelerating Hash Functions Based on SoC

This paper presents an architecture for fast prototyping of hardware designs aiming to accelerate cryptographic hash functions on Xilinx ZYNQ SoC. The design include both hardware and software components, using DMA and custom AXI4-Stream IPs for maximum performance and easy integration. The communication link between the hardware module that accelerates hash functions and the processor running Linux is accessible directly from the user-space, providing fast debugging/benchmarking capabilities. As a proof-of-concept, a custom, pipelined and optimized bitcoin miner module was developed in order to demonstrate the feasibility of this infrastructure, and to evaluate its performance. The proposed solution was implemented on an Arty Z7-20 development board.