Authors:
R. M. Bommi, M. Parvez Mohamed, S. Mohamed Imran
Addresses:
Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Chennai Institute of Technology, Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India.
Abstract:
The SIMON32/64 lightweight block cipher is appropriate for data security in resource-constrained IoT nodes, RFID tags, and wireless sensor networks. This cipher uses 32-round encryption. For small hardware platforms like the Tang Nano 9K FPGA, the technique uses 32-bit plaintext blocks with a 64-bit key in a strong, balanced Feistel network. Its algorithmic simplicity—only bitwise AND, XOR, and circular shift—makes it effective. This design architecture reduces hardware complexity, silicon area, and critical path delay by avoiding S-boxes and complex arithmetic units. Thus, gate-level simplicity directly affects dynamic power consumption, making architectural optimisations such as pipelining easier to implement and boosting throughput. The Tang Nano 9K platform achieves high operating frequencies (e.g., several hundred megahertz) and very low power consumption (usually around 24.254 mW), with some of the lowest power coming from quiescent leakage rather than active switching. The Tang Nano 9K's SIMON implementation is more energy efficient and heat-dissipating than previous FPGA generations like the Altera Cyclone 2, which use larger process nodes and waste more energy per encrypted bit in parallel implementations of comparable design SIMON's small form factor, sufficient security margins for lightweight applications, and low power consumption make it appealing to battery-powered smart sensors, passive or semi-passive RFID tags, and other embedded systems that value cost control and operational life.
Keywords: SIMON Cipher; Lightweight Cryptography; Tang Nano 9K; Gowin FPGA; IoT Security; Resource Optimisation; Power Analysis; FPGA Implementation; Comparative Study; Hardware Security.
Received on: 29/04/2025, Revised on: 20/07/2025, Accepted on: 25/09/2025, Published on: 07/06/2026
DOI: 10.64091/ATIEL.2026.000324
AVE Trends in Intelligent Energy Letters, 2026 Vol. 2 No. 1 , Pages: 37-53