  The finite field multiplier is mainly used in many of today's state of the
art digital systems and its hardware implementation for bit parallel operation
may require millions of logic gates. Natural causes or soft errors in digital
design could cause some of these gates to malfunction in the field, which could
cause the multiplier to produce incorrect outputs. To ensure that they are not
susceptible to error, it is crucial to use a finite field multiplier
implementation that is effective and has a high fault detection capability. In
this paper, we propose a novel fault detection scheme for a recent bit-parallel
polynomial basis multiplier over GF(2m), where the proposed method aims at
obtaining high fault detection performance for finite field multipliers and
meanwhile maintain low-complexity implementation which is favored in resource
constrained applications such as smart cards. The proposed method is based on
BCH error correction codes, with an area-delay efficient architecture. The
experimental results show that for 45-bit multiplier with 5-bit errors the
proposed error detection and correction architecture results in 37% and %49
reduction in critical path delay with compared to the existing method in [18].
Moreover, the area overhead for 45-bit multiplier with 5 errors is within 80%
which is significantly lower than the best existing BCH based fault detection
method in finite field multiplier [18].
