Encryption algorithms are required for a higher safety degree when
considering, for instance, data exchange in computer networks. AES (Advanced
Encryption Standard) is an alternative to cipher data and therefore increase
the security of sensitive data communication. A possible approach for a
good trade-off of this application regarding processing time, area, power, and
time-to-market is to use a co-design fashion, where portions of the algorithm
run in a processor, while other parts operate in hardware accelerators. The
proposed work, name LP-SB, is a low-power proposal for an AES co-design,
where the power-critical step of the algorithm (i.e., SubBytes) is ported to an
accelerator and, therefore, two low-power techniques are inserted for that block.
Power results running LB-SB on gate-level netlist resulted in around 13% of
power reduction when compared with the same block without the low-power
techniques. Moreover, the AES co-design proposed achieves 44-times more
performance when compared to the software-only solution, which is within the
expected improvement when compared to related AES co-design works.