home products company partners clients news careers contact us
standard aes fpga asic core

Standard AES cores

Overview

Many requirements for AES encryption fall in the middle ground in terms of the throughput they demand, and Helion recognise that in order for IP to be an effective choice, it should never be a compromise. Where many IP vendors may limit you to a choice of one or two solutions, Helion are different. We have developed a range of four AES core families each offering a different speed/area balance which together cover any throughput requirement up to many tens of Gbps; this way you can choose the most optimal fit for your particular requirement. Furthermore, we have invested a great deal of effort into developing our mid-rate solutions to a point where they are supremely efficient and very easy to use. In this section we look at the Standard AES core family.

Helion Standard AES Solutions

The Helion Standard AES core family is our mid-rate solution, aimed at applications which require a few hundred Mbps throughput, whilst offering a really efficient area footprint. This core is perfect for many applications, for example wired and wireless networking, or encrypting audio or video streams. The result is a core with a particularly high speed-to-area ratio, spanning all ASIC and FPGA technologies.

Despite its compact footprint, the Standard AES family forms a very powerful and flexible platform. It has been designed in modular form and is supplied as a series of powerful, re-usable building blocks. This way, you can build up all kinds of interesting solutions where resources can be shared or replicated according to your exact requirements. The Standard family offers full AES encryption and decryption using any combination of the three AES key sizes (128-, 192-, and 256-bits). It can be used to implement any of the common block cipher modes as well as many of the more recent complex modes (take a look at our AES modes pages for more information). The table below outlines the kind of area and performance achievable using the Standard AES core.

Measured Area and Performance
128-bit keysize ECB Encryption including hardware key expansion

TARGET PERFORMANCE LOGIC RAM
ASIC (0.13um CMOS) >650 Mbps <9.5k gates -
Altera Cyclone III/IV (C6) >450 Mbps 642 LEs 3 M9Ks
Altera Cyclone V (C6) >560 Mbps 281 ALMs 3 M10Ks
Altera Cyclone 10 GX (E5) >920 Mbps 258 ALMs 3 M20Ks
Altera Arria II GX (C4) >880 Mbps 341 ALMs 3 M9Ks
Altera Arria V GX (C4) >570 Mbps 279 ALMs 3 M10Ks
Altera Arria V GZ (C3) >930 Mbps 291 ALMs 3 M20Ks
Altera Arria 10 (E1S) >980 Mbps 281 ALMs 3 M20Ks
Altera Stratix IV (C2) >800 Mbps 340 ALMs 3 M9Ks
Altera Stratix V (C1) >1000 Mbps 314 ALMs 3 M20Ks
Lattice ECP3 (-8) >500 Mbps 443 slices 6 RAMs
Microsemi AX/RTAX (-2) >320 Mbps 1181 cells 6 RAMs
Microsemi ProASIC3 (-2) >350 Mbps 1326 tiles 3 RAMs
Xilinx Spartan-3A (-5) >420 Mbps 234 slices 3 RAMB16s
Xilinx Spartan-6 (-2) >410 Mbps 133 slices -
Xilinx Artix-7 (-3) >770 Mbps 133 slices -
Xilinx Virtex-5 (-3) >840 Mbps 155 slices -
Xilinx Virtex-6 (-3) >950 Mbps 129 slices -
Xilinx Virtex-7 (-3) >1100 Mbps 132 slices -
Xilinx Kintex-7 (-3) >1100 Mbps 132 slices -
Xilinx UltraSCALE (-2) >1300 Mbps 121 CLBs -
Xilinx UltraSCALE+ (-2) >1600 Mbps 120 CLBs -

If the performance of the Helion Standard AES core does not match your needs, try looking at our Fast AES cores if you need to go faster, or our Tiny AES cores if you are able to run at a lower rate.

Product Briefs

For full details of all the Helion AES core options, please download the appropriate Product Brief in PDF format below.

AES Cores - ASIC
AES Cores - FPGA
Whitepapers
Click here for an easy to read overview on AES in hardware (PDF format)

Contact

For more detailed information on this or any of our other products and services, please feel free to email us at helioncores@heliontech.com and we will be pleased to discuss how we can assist with your individual requirements.

Product Brief Quicklinks
Standard AES - ASIC
Standard AES - FPGA
 
What about FIPS compliance?

All Helion AES cores have been successfully FIPS certified. Click here for full details.....
Are you new to AES....?

Take a look at our Whitepaper for an easy to read overview on AES in hardware.....

Copyright © Helion Technology Licensing Ltd, 1998-2024. All rights reserved. Privacy and Cookies
Web Site Developed by Goldstag Limited