A reconfigurable functional unit for modular operations

The efficiency of standard microprocessors decreases when operations on short data are performed because they are optimized to perform operations on fixed size data. Short data processing and bit manipulation can be accelerated integrating a Reconfigurable Functional Unit (RFU ) in parallel with the ALU. An RFU is a tightly coupled integrated Reconfigurable Array used to speed-up the computation of a set of operations for which standard microprocessors are not optimized. In this paper we show the benefit of using the Adder-based Dynamic Architecture for Processing Tailored Operators (ADAPTO RFU) [1–3] (a full adder based RFU) on modular operations. In particular we describe how to speed up the modular addition and the Montgomery Multiplication by using the ADAPTO RFU