High Throughput and Energy Efficient SHA-2 ASIC Design for Continuous Integrity Checking Applications

High throughput and energy efficient integrated cryptographic hash primitives are important for the continuous integrity checking and tampering detection in secure access management mechanisms of on-chip instrumentation, such as the IJTAG. However, previous SHA-256 cores focus only on throughput. In this paper, we synthesize with a 32 nm CMOS Technology SHA-256 cores that can be integrated in ASICs, and we present insights on their achieved throughput and energy efficiency. Moreover, we present a novel clock-gated design for reducing dynamic power dissipation of SHA-256 cores; and a novel Multi-Vt design for reducing static power dissipation of SHA-256 cores. The proposed designs can achieve upto 25.9% improvement of the energy efficiency of existing SHA-256 designs, without impacting their performed throughput. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that applies low power design techniques on SHA-256 cores.