A Power-Efficient 256-bit Overlap-Free Karatsuba Multiplier Architecture for ECC on FPGA Platforms

Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) has emerged as a preferred security mechanism for resource-constrained Internet-of-Things (IoT) platforms due to its high security-to-key-size ratio. In hardware implementations of ECC over binary extension fields GF(2m), finite-field polynomial multiplication constitutes the most power-intensive operation. This work presents a power-efficient 256-bit overlap-free Karatsuba multiplier architecture implemented over GF(2m) and evaluated on the Xilinx Virtex-7 (xc7vx690tffg1761-2) FPGA platform. Binary extension fields are specifically chosen for their carry-free XOR-based arithmetic, which reduces logic depth and switching activity – advantages particularly suited to low-power FPGA implementations.Two distinct architectural strategies are investigated: a fully instantiated hierarchical design and an iterative, resource-shared design. While the instantiated architecture achieves minimal latency through parallel computation, it incurs excessive switching activity and power dissipation. In contrast, the proposed iterative architecture employs a Finite State Machine (FSM) to enable controlled hardware reuse, thereby significantly reducing switching activity.Post-synthesis analysis using Xilinx Vivado 2014.2 demonstrates that the iterative architecture achieves a reduction of approximately 89.5% in estimated dynamic power (from 590.37 W to 62.00 W) and 88.9% in total on-chip power (from 599.658 W to 66.325 W), at the cost of a 90.1% increase in LUT utilization (from 16,429 to 31,223). An analytical power model based on Karatsuba complexity is presented, confirming that dynamic power scales with exponent β ≈ 1.58 (instantiated) and β ≈ 1.54 (iterative), both closely consistent with the theoretical Karatsuba complexity (log2 3 ≈ 1.585). The relevance of binary polynomial multiplication in emerging Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) schemes highlights the broader applicability of the proposed architecture.