The IIS Chip Gallery

neptun3 (2010)

by

Erich Wenger, Norbert Felber

Main Details

Application	Cryptography
Technology	180
Manufacturer	UMC
Type	Diploma Thesis
Package	QFN56
Dimensions	1525μm x 1525μm
Gates	90 kGE
Voltage	1.8 V
Power	31.5 mW
Clock	100 MHz

Description

Neptun is a 16 bit general purpose processor which has been optimized for an efficient calculation of the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithms (ECDSA). It comes with 10kB program Memory, 1kB constant memory and 1kB RAM. With the implemented bootloader it is possible to load, process and evaluate different implementations of algorithms.

When Erich was naming the processor, he googled all 8 planets of our solar system. Neptun was the planet with the least number of hits.

Collaboration with IAIK - TU Graz

Related Publication

• Erich Wenger, Martin Feldhofer, Norbert Felber, "Low-Resource Hardware Design of an Elliptic Curve Processor for Contactless Devices", 11th International Workshop on Information Security Applications WISA 2010, South Korea