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

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.

Digital Architectures Under Society 5.0: An Enterprise Architecture Perspective

“…Manufacturing 2020 [28] 16 Smart state net scheme Smart cities 2020 [29] 17 Teleoperation system Generic 2021 [30] 18 Secure hash algorithm (SHA)-256 accelerator Generic 2021 [31] 19 AI-based communication-as-a-service Generic 2021 [32] 20 AI-based heart monitoring system Healthcare 2021 [33] 21 Intelligent health service Healthcare 2021 [34] 22 AIoT based picking algorithm eCommerce 2021 [35] 23 Robotics and digital platform (IoT) Healthcare 2021 [21] 24 Reference architecture for framework for MNCRP Generic 2021 [36] 25 530-mW multicore blockchain accelerator Generic 2021 [37] (continued) 27 Flexible/modular manufacturing system architecture Manufacturing 2021 [39] 28 Digital twin for smart cities Smart cities 2021 [40] 29 A generalized framework for tactile internet Generic 2021 [41] 30 Shiojiri environmental data compilation platform and IoT network Generic 2021 [42] 31 SMARTAGE platform Healthcare 2022 [12] 32 Delay-tolerant public blockchain network in healthcare systems…”