Power, Area, Speed, and Security (PASS) Trade-Offs of NIST PQC Signature Candidates Using a C to ASIC Design Flow

National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is standardizing post-quantum cryptographic (PQC) algorithms. Most of the PQC algorithms are complex; rendering their hardware modeling, evaluation, and benchmarking challenging. We developed a High-Level Synthesis (HLS) → ASIC flow for fast evaluation of Power, Area, Speed, and Security (PASS) trade-offs of the NIST round 2 PQC algorithms using an industry-standard design flow. In this paper, we discuss this flow and the preliminary results on some of the PQC signature algorithms.