(2026-04) PipeSC; A Resource-efficient and Pipelined Hardware Accelerator for Sumcheck Protocol
2026-04-08
Zero-knowledge Succinct Non-interactive Arguments of Knowledge (zk-SNARKs) are cryptographic protocols that allow a prover to convince verifiers of the correctness of a statement without revealing any additional information. Recent zk-SNARK constructions have shifted from univariate to multivariate polynomial-based designs, reducing the proving complexity from quasilinear to linear by avoiding costly univariate polynomial interpolation. This shift, however, makes the sumcheck protocol—a core primitive for verifying polynomial relations over the Boolean hypercube—the dominant component in the prover’s workload. Consequently, the iterative nature and intensive intermediate data movement of the sumcheck protocol introduce severe performance bottlenecks in CPU- and GPU-based implementations, especially for large-scale multivariate polynomials.
In this paper, we present PipeSC, a resource-efficient, ASIC-based accelerator for sumcheck. PipeSC combines deep pipelining, modular-multiplier reuse, and a finite-state machine-based dependency scheduler to sustain high utilization of computational resources across phases of the protocol. In addition, we introduce an Equality-MLE generation module that employs hierarchical scheduling and multiplier reuse, yielding a unified hardware substrate shared by multiple proving subroutines.
Against state-of-the-art CPU, GPU, and ASIC implementations, PipeSC delivers up to \textbf{5.02} speedup over the GPU implementation and up to \textbf{2756.2} speedup over the CPU implementation, while improving the area–time product (ATP) by up to \textbf{3.68} compared with the ASIC design. These results show that careful hardware–algorithm co-design and conflict-free scheduling substantially accelerate sumcheck, paving the way for fully integrated zk-SNARK hardware pipelines.