  This paper presents the hardware design and analysis of ACE and WAGE, two
candidate ciphers for the NIST Lightweight Cryptography standardization. Both
ciphers use sLiSCP's unified sponge duplex mode. ACE has an internal state of
320 bits, uses three 64 bit Simeck boxes, and implements both authenticated
encryption and hashing. WAGE is based on the Welch-Gong stream cipher and
provides authenticated encryption. WAGE has 259 bits of state, two 7 bit
Welch-Gong permutations, and four lightweight 7 bit S-boxes. ACE and WAGE have
the same external interface and follow the same I/O protocol to transition
between phases. The paper illustrates how a hardware perspective influenced key
aspects of the ACE and WAGE algorithms. The paper reports area, power, and
energy results for both serial and parallel (unrolled) implementations using
four different ASIC libraries: two 65 nm libraries, a 90 nm library, and a 130
nm library. ACE implementations range from a throughput of 0.5 bits-per-clock
cycle (bpc) and an area of 4210 GE (averaged across the four ASIC libraries) up
to 4 bpc and 7260 GE. WAGE results range from 0.57 bpc with 2920 GE to 4.57 bpc
with 11080 GE.
