Crypto algorithms play an important role in transfer, verification, storage and processing of data. Crypto application includes encryption/decryption, checksum, hash, signature/verification, etc. Modern crypto algorithms are complicated and keep evolving, especially in new areas like block-chain application. FPGA is suitable for a wide variety of crypto algorithms and able to provide competitive or even better performance than CPU. It is also convenient to construct a processing pipeline while crypto processing is one of the pipeline stages, which will save bandwidth cost and improve performance. Last but not the least, FPGA could have multiple compute units working in parallel, which will also improve total performance.
