ZK-Tracer: A High-Performance Heterogeneous Accelerator for Zero-Knowledge VM Trace Generation
摘要
Zero-knowledge virtual machines (zkVMs) are a key technology for driving the large-scale adoption of zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP), but their performance bottlenecks severely limit their practicality. While current hardware acceleration research has exclusively focused on backend proving, we identify that the frontend execution and trace generation phase is rapidly emerging as the new system bottleneck. To address this challenge, we propose ZK-Tracer, the first hardware accelerator architecture specifically designed for the zkVM frontend. ZK-Tracer features a novel heterogeneous design comprising a Main Trace Unit and parallel Permutation Trace Units. It exposes a fine-grained interface to the host software through a lightweight instruction set extension, enabling efficient task offloading. Our ASIC implementation results demonstrate that ZK-Tracer achieves up to 1829x speedup in trace generation over a high-performance multi-core CPU. When integrated with existing backend proving accelerators, it delivers a remarkable 963x end-to-end performance improvement for the entire ZKP system.
引用
@article{arxiv.2605.25493,
title = {ZK-Tracer: A High-Performance Heterogeneous Accelerator for Zero-Knowledge VM Trace Generation},
author = {Jieran Cui and Zhengkai Wen and Haowen Fang and Yinan Zhu and Jia Xiong and Cheng Ni and Mingchi Zhang and Nan Guan and Xi Wang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.25493},
year = {2026}
}
备注
This paper has been accepted by DAC 2026 and will appear in the proceedings