A Fast Keccak Hardware Design for High Performance Hashing System

Abstract

The growth of cryptocurrencies has attracted much attention from a variety of fields, especially in academic research. Their protocol is built and developed on blockchain technology. One of them is Ethereum which is a popular and highest valued cryptocurrency on the market. Therefore, the need for space to store transactions information increases, leading to the creating of blocks is extremely urgent. This work is called Ethereum mining. Miners have to solve a problem called Ethash (Ethereum’s Proof-of-Work) to find the results satisfied the requirements of the problem. In this paper, we proposed a hardware design architecture to perform the Ethash mining system. To obtain the high performance for the Ethashed block mining system, the fast design of the Keccak function is also proposed. The design is implemented on Xilinx Virtex 7 FPGA-VC707. The throughput of our proposed Keccak function reaches 8 Gbps with efficiency of 5.5 Mbps/Slice. The hashrate of the mining system reaches 88KH/s at frequency of 19.231MHz.