Modern application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) integrate greater and greater functionality. These so-called system-on-a-chip integrate many components of a computer or other electronic system into a single integrated circuit. One advantage of system-on-a-chip designs is that they usually consume less power and have a lower cost than the multichip systems they replace. Furthermore, systems-on-a-chip help reduce overall system production cost because there are fewer packages in a given system.
Some of the functions integrated into systems-on-a-chip include graphics, Ethernet media access control layer (MAC), Universal serial bus (USB), memory controllers, and other application-specific logic. Another compute intensive function that may be incorporated into an ASIC are hardware cryptographic function blocks. Cryptography modules become more and more ubiquitous in modern ASICs for various applications.
Typically, these cryptographic modules supports different standards. They also typically use different interfaces. In particular, these cryptographic modules often also require very specific and precise timing schedule for input/output information.