[Cryptech Tech] Survey of FPGA devices for the new board

[Joachim Strömbergson]

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Aloha!

Here is a short survey of FPGAs for the new board. Right now I've only
looked at the offerings from Altera. The reason for this is that I
personally think their tools are much better and esp more user friendly
than similar offerings from Xilinx. I'm sure there are those who
disagrees violently about this. But just based on what Paul and Rob has
experienced with ISE so far, having as user friendly tools as possible
is good for the project adaptation.

For what we want to do (mainly implement crypto cores running at
moderate speeds) the offerings from Xilinx and Altera are so good that
neither provides a clear advantage over the other.

Anyway, if we look at what we have today with hashes, aes and the RNG,
we basically will fill the FPGA on the TerasIC C5G board. That board is
equipped with an Altera Cylone 5 GX size model C5 that contains 77 kLEs
(the MUX based HW block used to implemen general logic and the resource
we run out of first.)

We want to additionally add a modular exponentiation core, Curve25519,
possibly GOST and then some stuff for things like key wrapping. This is
at least in the same amount of logic as the other stuff. So a device
with 2x amount of resources is bare minimum. And as Randy said, at this
stage we want to throw resources at the problem and avoind resource
bottlenecks if avoidable.

Price wise Digikey charges 171 USD for single units of the device on the
TerasIC C5G board (a board that costs 179 USD, naturally they don't by
single units and get a lower price.)

The C7 device has 150 kLE, that is 2x number of resources. Digikey lists
this device at 300 USD. This device is too small.

The C9 device has 301 kLE, which is 3.9x number of resources and should
be enough with good margin. Digikey list price for single units is 383 USD.

Cyclone is the low cost, high volume series from Altera. The Arria
family is the next step up. It contains more high speed interface
macros, but also provides mode logic. The logic block architecture is
the same as in Cyclone which makes the comparison easier. There are
Three devices with more resources than the Cyclone C5 device:

B2: 362 kLE - 4.7x more resources
B5: 420 kLE - 5.5x more resources
B7: 504 kLE - 6.5x more resources


Digikey prices for these devices goes from 700 USD to 1200 USD (ouch)
Altera also has a family of high end devices called Stratix (there are
also generations within each family Cyclone III, IV, V. I look at the
latest generation). Stratix has devices that gives 10x and more
resources, but then we are in multiple kUSD prices. The device on the
TerasIC TR5-Lite board is an example. That board sells for 6800 USD.
There are SFP cages, some memories etc. But that price is probably a
good indication of the price for the chip.

http://www.terasic.com.tw/cgi-bin/page/archive.pl?Language=English&CategoryNo=158&No=856

My view is that the Cyclone C9 should suffice and give us enough room to
allow us to add the functionality of the use cases for the new board and
still have good room for place and route. I think the clock frequency
will end up being 50-66 MHz and not above that. For these chips that
gives fairly good margins to route designs.

- -- 
Med vänlig hälsning, Yours

Joachim Strömbergson - Alltid i harmonisk svängning.
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 Joachim Strömbergson          Secworks AB          joachim at secworks.se
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