Highly-Efficient Unified Polynomial Arithmetic Module Architecture for Falcon PQC Scheme

To address the emerging vulnerabilities posed by quantum computers to classical asymmetric cryptography, Falcon-a digital signature algorithm-was selected by NIST as a standard for post-quantum cryptography. Based on the NTRU-lattice structure, Falcon relies heavily on number theoretic and fast-Fourier transforms, which are among the most computationally demanding and time-consuming operations. To over-come these challenges, this paper proposes a novel architecture called the Unified Polynomial Arithmetic Module (UniPAM), specifically designed for the Falcon verification algorithm. The proposed UniPAM offers an efficient and hardware-friendly architecture capable of performing all required polynomial arithmetic operations, achieving significantly improved performance while maintaining comparable hardware resource consumption to state-of-the-art designs. Implementation results demonstrate that UniPAM achieves substantial efficiency gains, as measured by the Area-Time Product metric, outperforming existing solutions.