## Elliptic Curve Digital Signatures

December 9, 2015

A digital signature is used to prove a message is connected to a specific sender.  The sender can not deny they sent that message once signed, and no one can modify the message and maintain the signature. The message itself is not necessarily secret. Certificates of authenticity, digital cash, and software distribution use digital signatures so recipients can verify they are getting what they paid for.

Since messages can be of any length and mathematical algorithms always use fixed...

## Elliptic Curve Key Exchange

December 3, 2015

Elliptic Curve Cryptography is used to create a Public Key system that allows two people (or computers) to exchange public data so that both sides know a secret that no one else can find in a reasonable time.  The simplest method uses a fixed public key for each person.  Once cracked, every message ever sent with that key is open.  More advanced key exchange systems have "perfect forward secrecy" which means that even if one message key is cracked, no other message will...

## Discrete-Time PLLs, Part 1: Basics

December 1, 20159 comments

Design Files: Part1.slx

Hi everyone,

In this series of tutorials on discrete-time PLLs we will be focusing on Phase-Locked Loops that can be implemented in discrete-time signal proessors such as FPGAs, DSPs and of course, MATLAB.

In the first part of the series, we will be reviewing the basics of continuous-time baseband PLLs and we will see some useful mathematics that will give us insight into the inners working of PLLs. In the second part, we will focus on...

## Polynomial Inverse

November 23, 20152 comments

One of the important steps of computing point addition over elliptic curves is a division of two polynomials.  When working in $GF(2^n)$ we don't have large enough powers to actually do a division, so we compute the inverse of the denominator and then multiply.  This is usually done using Euclid's method, but if squaring and multiplying are fast we can take advantage of these operations and compute the multiplicative inverse in just a few steps.

The first time I ran across this...

## One Clock Cycle Polynomial Math

November 20, 201514 comments

Error correction codes and cryptographic computations are most easily performed working with $GF(2^n)$  polynomials.  By using very special values of $n$ we can build circuits which multiply and square in one clock cycle on an FPGA. These circuits come about by flipping back and forth between a standard polynomial basis and a normal basis representation of elements in $GF(2^n)$.

A normal basis is yet another form of polynomial but instead of adding powers of $\beta$ we add...

## Elliptic Curve Cryptography

November 16, 20156 comments

Secure online communications require encryption.  One standard is AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) from NIST.  But for this to work, both sides need the same key for encryption and decryption.  This is called Private Key encryption.  Public Key encryption is used to create a private key between two sides that have not previously communicated.  Compared to the history of encryption, Public Key methods are very recent having been started in the 1970's.  Elliptic...

## An absolute position encoder VHDL core

November 11, 2015
Introduction

Let's consider motorized systems controlled by electronics. A closed loop architecture looks like this:

The following components are involved:

• the motor itself (DC, stepper ...),
• the controller, in charge of computing position according to the whole system state,
• the driver board in charge of generating signals and power for the motor,
• the position encoder, the subject of this post.

Most of the time, there is a difference between the position the system...

## Helping New Bloggers to Break the Ice: A New Ipad Pro for the Author with the Best Article!

November 9, 2015

Breaking the ice can be tough.  Over the years, many individuals have asked to be given access to the blogging interface only to never post an article.  Maybe they underestimated the time it takes to write a decent article, or maybe they got cold feet. I don't blame or judge them at all - how many times in my life have I had the intention to do something but didn't follow through?  Once, maybe twice 😉 (don't worry if you don't...

## Polynomial Math

November 3, 20152 comments

Elliptic Curve Cryptography is used as a public key infrastructure to secure credit cards, phones and communications links. All these devices use either FPGA's or embedded microprocessors to compute the algorithms that make the mathematics work. While the math is not hard, it can be confusing the first time you see it.  This blog is an introduction to the operations of squaring and computing an inverse over a finite field which are used in computing Elliptic Curve arithmetic. ...

## Welcoming MANY New Bloggers!

October 27, 20153 comments

The response to the latest call for bloggers has been amazing and I am very grateful.

In this post I present to you the individuals who, so far (I am still receiving applications at an impressive rate and will update this page as more bloggers are added),  have been given access to the blogging interface.  I am very pleased with the positive response and I think the near future will see the publication of many great articles, given the quality of the...

## FPGA or DSP Processor - Parameters to Make the Right Choice

December 28, 20112 comments

Introduction

Digital Signal Processing (DSP) has a huge global market that is growing fast day by day with rapidly evolving sophisticated modern electronics applications like 3G wireless, voice over internet protocol (VoIP), multimedia systems, radar and satellite systems, medical systems, image-processing applications and consumer electronics. These sophisticated DSP applications pose many conflicting challenges to system designers and application developers in terms of cost and...

## Makefiles for Xilinx Tools

May 12, 20155 comments

Building a bitstream from an HDL is a complicated process that requires the cooperation of a lot of tools.  You can hide behind an IDE or grow a pair and use command line tools and a makefile to tie your build process together.  I am not a huge fan of makefiles either (I believe a language should be expressive enough to automate the build process), but the alternatives are dismal.

Command-line driven workflow is easier on the hands and faster.  The example...

## Use Microprogramming to Save Resources and Increase Functionality

March 21, 2015
Introduction

Microprogramming is a design approach that every FPGA designer should have in their bag of tricks. I subscribe to the concept that microprogramming is a structured approach to the design of state machines. This is essentially the view of Maurice Wilkes when he first proposed microprogramming in 1951 as an alternative method for the implementation of the control section of a computer. Wilkes was interested in improving the reliability and reducing time needed to implement...

## Launch of Youtube Channel: My First Videos - Embedded World 2017

April 5, 201721 comments

I went to Embedded World 2017 in Nuremberg with an ambitious plan; I would make video highlights of several exhibits (booths) to be presented to the *Related sites audience.  I would try to make the vendors focus their pitch on the essential in order to produce a one to three minutes video per booth.

So far my experience with making videos was limited to family videos, so I knew I had lots of reading to do and lots of Youtube videos and tutorials to watch.  Trade shows are...

## Designing Embedded System with FPGA - 1

October 28, 200711 comments

With the introduction of soft processors and related tools (like EDK from Xilinx), implementation of basic embedded system in FPGA is made easy. This requires very little or almost no knowledge of VHDL programming. Actually that’s how I started. If user is interested in taking full advantage of FPGA and its parallel processing power, then yes, detail understanding of soft processor, its peripheral bus and VHDL programming is required.

## MyHDL Resources and Projects

December 9, 20122 comments

Last updated 07-Nov-2017

MyHDL Resources

If you want to dive into MyHDL (digital hardware description in Python) there are many resources available.  Below is a list of MyHDL resources, including some of the past blogs here on fpgarelated.

The MyHDL manual is a great (probably the best) place to get started.

The manual is an in-depth introduction to MyHDL.  The concepts are well explained and there are examples to test while working through the...

## Embedded World 2018 - More Videos!

March 27, 20181 comment

After the interview videos last week, this week I am very happy to release two more videos taken at Embedded World 2018 and that I am proud of.

For both videos, I made extensive use of my two new toys, a Zhiyun Crane Gimbal and a Sony a6300 camera.

The use of a gimbal like the Zhiyun makes a big difference in terms of making the footage look much more stable and cinematographic.

As for the Sony camera, it takes fantastic slow-motion footage and...

## Running Average

February 15, 20166 comments

The running average filter is a useful way to reduce noise in a system.  One project I recently worked on required a 4 times frequency output from an encoder input.  The problem was the encoder is mounted to the wheel of an old truck and bearing noise was making the original algorithm generate way too many pulses.  The original algorithm worked, but the noise on the input made it useless.

I first implemented the moving average based on

## Crowdfunding Articles?

April 12, 201828 comments

Many of you have the knowledge and talent to write technical articles that would benefit the EE community.  What is missing for most of you though, and very understandably so, is the time and motivation to do it.

But what if you could make some money to compensate for your time spent on writing the article(s)?  Would some of you find the motivation and make the time?

I am thinking of implementing a system/mechanism that would allow the EE community to...

## Data Types for Control & DSP

April 26, 20166 comments

There's a lot of information out there on what data types to use for digital signal processing, but there's also a lot of confusion, so the topic bears repeating.

I recently posted an entry on PID control. In that article I glossed over the data types used by showing "double" in all of my example code.  Numerically, this should work for most control problems, but it can be an extravagant use of processor resources.  There ought to be a better way to determine what precision you need...