38.6.1 Principle of Operation
The following is a high level description of the algorithm. These are the steps:
- KeyExpansion: Round keys are derived from the cipher key using Rijndael's key schedule.
- InitialRound:
- AddRoundKey: Each byte of the state is combined with the round key using bitwise XOR.
- Rounds:
- SubBytes: A non-linear substitution step where each byte is replaced with another according to a lookup table.
- ShiftRows: A transposition step where each row of the state is shifted cyclically a certain number of steps.
- MixColumns: A mixing operation which operates on the columns of the state, combining the four bytes in each column.
- AddRoundKey
- Final Round (no MixColumns):
- SubBytes
- ShiftRows
- AddRoundKey
The relationship between the module's clock frequency and throughput (in bytes per second) is given by:
Clock Frequency = (Throughput/2) x (Nr+1) for 2 byte parallel processing
Clock Frequency = (Throughput/4) x (Nr+1) for 4 byte parallel processing
where Nr is the number of rounds, depending on the key length.