Re:FPGAs and Heat (Re: Paranoid Musings)

[mccoy@communities.com (Jim McCoy)]

Oddly enough, I just left a talk at the '96 Genetic Programming conference on
developing adaptable hardware and silicon evolution.  One of the speakers at
this particular session was the Product Line Manager from Xilinx and one of
the goodies he handed out was pre-release data sheets for the new XC6200
series of FPGAs they are producing (the chips are already out in limited
quantities) so here is a little update on the state of the art in this area.

Tim May writes:
> Bill Frantz wrote:
> >>  o As more and more chips are added to a machine, two effects occur:
> >>
> >>      o Interconnections increase and increase running time;
> >>      o Heat from the chips eventually limit [sic] the size of a
> >>        machine.
> >Fast machines produce a lot of heat.
>
> But, as many have pointed out, this is not a realistic limit.

One can also use reversible logic to get arond the heat problem if mechanical
means are not enough.  This is a necessity for molecular-scale computing and
during the post-session BS at another talk we speced out a system that could
probably evolve a reversible logic compiler.  Heat will not be a "wall" at
any scale, it may add to the cost a little bit but the problem is solvable.

The interconnection problem has also been solved in this chip series. [A
long-standing problem with FPGAs is that there were generally a limited
amount of "wires" running between the logic elements and thus a lot of cells
were wasted because there were no interconnections left, I/O to the outside
world was also a problem.]  The chip has a really cool interconnection method
which allows a much more efficient use of the chip real estate and which
makes the entire chip directly addresable (like regular RAM) through an
on-chip interface module.  Given the relatively compact design in Ian and
Dave's paper and the new chips one might even fit two or four cracking
engines on a single FPGA.

Either the NSA did not do thier homework in this area or they are lying.

> >Now I have no problem with believing NSA would invest $7 million.  However,
> >$700 million makes me wonder.  With FPGAs, there is a significant risk that
> >people will change the crypto system and make the investment worthless.
> >(Which, I guess, is why they prefer general purpose computers.)  However,
> >if they can get the equivalent of a few bits of key back by cryptanalysis,
> >then they knock the costs down to entirely reasonable (for them) levels.
>
> An FPGA is field-programmable. (FPGA = Field Programmable Gate Arrays) The
> Xilynx and Altera lines of FPGAs could be reconfigured for other
> algorithms, surely. (I recall several preliminary designs discussed in
> various places.)

There are two types of FPGAs, one is based on anti-fuse technology which is
essentially a big complicated PROM, but the Xilinx FPGAs use SRAM to
configure the interconnections between logic elements.  The newest line from
Xilinx, the XC6000 series has the capability to be reconfigured either
partially or completely from an on-chip cache in 5 ns.  That is five
nanoseconds and you have a completely different piece of virtual hardware. If
the configuration is loaded through the slowest I/O port on the chip it only
takes 200 microseconds. Even if the encryption algorithm is secret these
chips open up interesting posiblities for developing general-purpose
cryptanalysis machines. [Hmm, there may be a paper in there... "Evolving A
General-Purpose Cryptanalysis Engine"...]  What is even better from the
perspective of the NSA accountants is that they only need to build the
machine _once_, after that they just load up a new set of interconnections
and now the DES cracker is an IDEA cracker.  Add to this the fact that the
XC6000 series were designed to be built cheaply in large quantities (the
Xilinx rep figures the price will get down to $29/chip in 5K lots for the
samples he was passing around and he is a wafer guy and not marketting droid
so this may be reasonably accurate.)  If anything, the Blaze, et many als.
paper _underestimated_ the cost of a FPGA hardware cracking engine,
particularly if you amortize the savings FPGAs give over the long term with
thier almost limitless flexibility.

jim