Fast Non-Adjacent Form (NAF) Conversion through a Bit-Stream Scan

Doo-Hee Hwang, Jin-Myeong Shin, Yoon-Ho Choi

http://doi.org/

As a special form of the signed-digit representation, the NAF(non-adjacent form) minimizes the hamming weight by reducing the average density of the non-zero bits from the binary representation of the positive integer k. Due to this advantage, the NAF is used in various fields; in particular, it is actively used in cryptology. The existing NAF-conversion algorithm, however, is problematic because the conversion speed decreases when the LSB(least significant bit) frequently becomes "1" during the binary positive integer conversion process. This paper suggests a method for the improvement of the NAF-conversion speed for which the problems that occur in the existing NAF-conversion process are solved. To verify the performance improvement of the algorithm, the CPU cycle for the various inputs were measured on the ATmega128, a low-performance 8-bit microprocessor. The results of this study show that, compared with the existing algorithm, the suggested algorithm not only improved the processing speed of the major patterns by 20% or more on average, but it also reduced the NAF-conversion time by 13% or more.