BCA: A 530-mW Multicore Blockchain Accelerator for Power-Constrained Devices in Securing Decentralized Networks

【Author】 Tran, Thi Hong; Pham, Hoai Luan; Phan, Tri Dung; Nakashima, Yasuhiko

【Source】IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS I-REGULAR PAPERS

【影响因子】4.140

【Abstract】Blockchain distributed ledger technology (DLT) has widespread applications in society 5.0 because it improves service efficiency and significantly reduces labor costs. However, employing blockchain DLT entails considerable energy consumption in the mining process. This paper proposes a blockchain accelerator (BCA) with ultralow power consumption and a high processing rate to address the problem. The BCA focuses on accelerating the double secure hash algorithm (SHA) 256 function required in the mining process at a system-onchip (SoC) level. We propose three ideas, namely, multiple local memories (multimem), double-cell processing element (D-PE), and nonce autoupdate (NAU), to reduce the external data transfer time and improve the BCA hardware efficiency. We propose a cascaded multiple BCA chip model to enhance the system throughput by several-fold. Our experiments on an ASIC and FPGA prove that the proposed BCA successfully performs the mining process for multiple blockchain networks with much lower power consumption than that of the state-of-the-art CPUs and GPUs. The BCA is laid out with Renesas 65 nm technology with a chip area of 25 mm(2) and consumes 530 mW at 100 MHz. The power efficiency of the layout chip is improved by 2428 and 143 times compared with that of the fastest CPU Intel i9-10940X and GPU RTX 3090, respectively.

【Keywords】Power demand; Blockchain; Bitcoin mining; double SHA-256; accelerator; embedded system; SoC; society 5.0

【发表时间】2021 OCT

【收录时间】2022-01-01

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