Unified FHE Accelerator Targets Logic and SIMD Schemes on One Array
Minxuan Zhou of the Illinois Institute of Technology argues that fully homomorphic encryption will not become practical through cryptographic schemes alone, because its costs are dominated by ciphertext expansion, polynomial arithmetic, and data movement. In a Microsoft Research talk hosted by Patrick Longa, Zhou presents UFC, a unified FHE accelerator designed to support both logic and SIMD schemes by reducing their workloads to shared low-level primitives rather than building separate scheme-specific pipelines. The case for UFC is that hybrid FHE applications need both styles of computation, and that a common hardware substrate, NTT-centered interconnect, near-memory support, and compiler scheduling can outperform or avoid the inefficiencies of split accelerators.
Microsoft Research·Jun 4, 2026·15 min read
