An Ultra-efficient Look-up Table based Programmable Processing in Memory Architecture for Data Encryption

Processing in Memory (PIM), a non-von Neumann computing paradigm, has emerged as a faster and more efficient alternative to the traditional computing devices for data-centric applications such as Data Encryption. In this work, we present a novel PIM architecture implemented using programmable Lookup Tables (LUT) inside a DRAM chip to facilitate massively parallel and ultra-efficient data encryption with the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) algorithm. Its LUT-based architecture replaces logic-based computations with LUT ‘look-ups’ to minimize power consumption and operational latency. The proposed PIM architecture is organized as clusters of homogeneous, interconnected LUTs that can be dynamically programmed to execute operations required for performing AES encryption. Our simulations show that the proposed PIM architecture can offer up to 14.6× and 1.8× higher performance compared to CUDA-based implementation of AES Encryption on a high-end commodity GPU and a state-of-the-art GPU Computing Processor, respectively. At the same time, it also achieves 217× and 31.2× higher energy efficiency, respectively, than the aforementioned devices while performing AES Encryption.