OPTIMAL DATAPATH DESIGN FOR A CRYPTOGRAPHIC PROCESSOR: THE BLOWFISH ALGORITHM

BLOWFISH is a fast cryptographic software algorithm, using the operations of addition, XOR and look-up tables.
This paper reports on the design of a hardware implementation for greater speed, with pipelining and different bitwidths
of registers and processing units. An 8-bit parallel data-path gives the best performance, mapping into 4
independent 8-bit modules, with a throughput at least 4 times greater than with 32-bit hardware. The design is
suitable for implementation using small amounts of RAM and programmable logic.