ASIC Design and Power Characterization of Standard and Low Power Multi-Radix Trivium

Abstract

We are presenting the experimental measurements of the power consumption and the maximum frequency in an ASIC prototype of 12 versions of the Trivium cipher: one standard version and two low power versions (FPLP and MPLP) with four different radix (radix-1, radix-2, radix-8 and radix-16). It is also described the mechanism for measuring power consumption in each Trivium implemented in the ASIC prototype. The clock tree of the ciphers has been designed in such a way that the clock signal of each Trivium can be cut independently. The experimental setup uses the Agilent 93000 testing system. The results show that the higher radix versions have a lower operating frequency and that the lower radix low-power versions have a very high power reduction. However, the Trivium radix-16 versions generate 16 bit/clock cycle so the measurements conclude that the MPLP version is the one with the lowest power consumption per bit (0.69 pJ/bit at 50 MHz).