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Polynomial multiplication over the quotient ring is a critical operation in Ring Learning with Errors (Ring-LWE) based cryptosystems that are used for post-quantum cryptography and homomorphic encryption. This operation can be efficiently implemented using number-theoretic transform (NTT)-based architectures. Among these, pipelined parallel NTTbased polynomial multipliers are attractive for cloud computing as these are well suited for high throughput and low latency applications. For a given polynomial length, a pipelined parallel NTT-based multiplier can be designed with varying degrees of parallelism, resulting in different tradeoffs. Higher parallelism reduces latency but increases area and power consumption,and vice versa. In this paper, we develop a predictive model based on synthesized results for pipelined parallel NTT-based polynomial multipliers and analyze design tradeoffs in terms of area, power, energy, area-time product, and area-energy product across parallelism levels up to 128. We predict that, for very long polynomials, area and power differences between designs with varying levels of parallelism become negligible. In contrast, areatime product and energy per polynomial multiplication decrease with increased parallelism. Our findings suggest that, given area and power constraints, the highest feasible level of parallelism optimizes latency, area-time product, and energy per polynomial multiplication.
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This content will become publicly available on June 11, 2026
Architectures for Serial and Parallel Pipelined NTT-Based Polynomial Modular Multiplication
Quantum computers pose a significant threat to modern cryptographic systems by efficiently solving problems such as integer factorization through Shor’s algorithm. Homomorphic encryption (HE) schemes based on ring learning with errors (Ring-LWE) offer a quantum-resistant framework for secure computations on encrypted data. Many of these schemes rely on polynomial multiplication, which can be efficiently accelerated using the number theoretic transform (NTT) in leveled HE, ensuring practical performance for privacy-preserving applications. This article presents a novel NTT-based serial pipelined multiplier that achieves full-hardware utilization through interleaved folding, and overcomes the 50% under-utilization limitation of the conventional serial R2MDC architecture. In addition, it explores tradeoffs in pipelined parallel designs, including serial, 2-parallel, and 4-parallel architectures. Our designs leverage increased parallelism, efficient folding techniques, and optimizations for a selected constant modulus to achieve superior throughput (TP) compared with state-of-the-art implementations. While the serial fold design minimizes area consumption, the 4-parallel design maximizes TP. Experimental results on the Virtex-7 platform demonstrate that our architectures achieve at least 2.22 times higher TP/area for a polynomial length of 1024 and 1.84 times for a polynomial length of 4096 in the serial fold design, while the 4-parallel design achieves at least 2.78 times and 2.79 times, respectively. The efficiency gain is even more pronounced in TP squared over area, where the serial fold and 4-parallel designs outperform prior works by at least 4.98 times and 26.43 times for a polynomial length of 1024 and 6.7 times and 43.77 times for a polynomial length of 4096, respectively. These results highlight the effectiveness of our architectures in balancing performance, area efficiency, and flexibility, making them well-suited for high-speed cryptographic applications.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2243053
- PAR ID:
- 10599772
- Publisher / Repository:
- IEEE
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems
- ISSN:
- 1063-8210
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 14
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- Folding , homomorphic encryption (HE) , interleaving , number theoretic transform (NTT) , parallel processing , pipelining , polynomial modular multiplication
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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