{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,2,26]],"date-time":"2026-02-26T15:25:19Z","timestamp":1772119519562,"version":"3.50.1"},"reference-count":44,"publisher":"Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)","issue":"5","funder":[{"name":"UAE Technology Innovation Institute","award":["101095947"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["101095947"]}]},{"name":"HORIZON CHIPS-Joint Undertaking program"},{"name":"Spoke 1 on Future High-Performance Computing"},{"name":"Italian Research Center on High-Performance Computing, Big Data and Quantum Computing"},{"name":"Ministry of University and Research"}],"content-domain":{"domain":["dl.acm.org"],"crossmark-restriction":true},"short-container-title":["ACM Trans. Embed. Comput. Syst."],"published-print":{"date-parts":[[2025,9,30]]},"abstract":"<jats:p>\n            The rapid advancement and exploration of open-hardware RISC-V platforms are catalyzing substantial changes across critical sectors, including autonomous vehicles, smart-city infrastructure, and medical devices. Within this technological evolution, OpenTitan emerges as a groundbreaking open-source RISC-V design, renowned for its comprehensive security toolkit and role as a stand-alone system-on-chip (SoC). OpenTitan encompasses different SoC implementations such as Earl Grey,\n            <jats:xref ref-type=\"fn\">\n              <jats:sup>1<\/jats:sup>\n            <\/jats:xref>\n            fully implemented and silicon proven, and Darjeeling,\n            <jats:xref ref-type=\"fn\">\n              <jats:sup>2<\/jats:sup>\n            <\/jats:xref>\n            announced but not yet fully implemented. The former targets a stand-alone SoC implementation; the latter is oriented towards an integrable implementation. Therefore, the literature currently lacks a silicon-ready embedded implementation of an open-source Root of Trust despite the effort made by lowRISC on the Darjeeling implementation of OpenTitan. We address the limitations of existing implementations, focusing on optimizing data transfer latency between memory and cryptographic accelerators to prevent under-utilization and ensure efficient task acceleration. Our contributions include a comprehensive methodology for integrating custom extensions and intellectual properties (IPs) into the Earl Grey architecture, architectural enhancements for system-level integration, support for varied boot modes, and improved data movement across the platform. These advancements facilitate the deployment of OpenTitan in broader SoCs, even in scenarios lacking specific technology-dependent IPs, providing a deployment-ready research vehicle for the community. We integrated the extended Earl Grey architecture into a reference architecture in 22-nm FDX technology node. Then, we benchmarked the enhanced architecture\u2019s performance, analyzing the latency introduced by the external memory hierarchic levels, presenting significant improvements in cryptographic processing speed, achieving up to 2.7\n            <jats:italic toggle=\"yes\">x<\/jats:italic>\n            speedup for SHA-256\/HMAC and 1.6\n            <jats:italic toggle=\"yes\">x<\/jats:italic>\n            for AES accelerators compared with baseline Earl Grey architecture.\n          <\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1145\/3690823","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2024,9,5]],"date-time":"2024-09-05T12:09:16Z","timestamp":1725538156000},"page":"1-29","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1145\/crossmark-policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":5,"title":["Unleashing OpenTitan\u2019s Potential: a Silicon-Ready Embedded Secure Element for Root of Trust and Cryptographic Offloading"],"prefix":"10.1145","volume":"24","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0009-0003-7861-9129","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Maicol","family":"Ciani","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Energy and Information (DEI), University of Bologna","place":["Bologna, Italy"]}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-6607-7367","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Emanuele","family":"Parisi","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Energy and Information (DEI), Universit\u00e0 di Bologna","place":["Bologna, Italy"]}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0009-0003-1912-3801","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Alberto","family":"Musa","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Energy and Information (DEI), University of Bologna","place":["Bologna, Italy"]}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-5155-6883","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Francesco","family":"Barchi","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Energy and Information (DEI), University of Bologna","place":["Bologna, Italy"]}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-1148-2450","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Andrea","family":"Bartolini","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Energy and Information (DEI), University of Bologna","place":["Bologna, Italy"]}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0009-0005-5755-7402","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Ari","family":"Kulmala","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Technology Innovation Institute","place":["Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates"]}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-6295-5476","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Rafail","family":"Psiakis","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Technology Innovation Institute","place":["Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates"]}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-7495-6895","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Angelo","family":"Garofalo","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Energy and Information (DEI), UNIBO","place":["Bologna, Italy"]}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-7323-759X","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Andrea","family":"Acquaviva","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Energy and Information (DEI), University of Bologna","place":["Bologna, Italy"]}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-0651-5393","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Rossi","family":"Davide","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Energy and Information (DEI), University of Bologna","place":["Bologna, Italy"]}]}],"member":"320","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2025,9,13]]},"reference":[{"key":"e_1_3_2_2_2","first-page":"2243","volume-title":"31st USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security\u201922)","author":"Aliaj Esmerald","year":"2022","unstructured":"Esmerald Aliaj, Ivan De Oliveira Nunes, and Gene Tsudik. 2022. 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