Vector processors are a type of Processing unit that specialize in executing operations on arrays or vectors of data elements simultaneously . They can achieve higher levels of computational efficiency . Vector processors can play a significant role in accelerating cryptographic operations. Many cryptographic algorithms, such as AES (Advanced Encryption Standard), rely on operations like substitution, permutation, and bitwise operations, which can be parallelized. Vector processors can perform these operations simultaneously on multiple data elements, speeding up the encryption and decryption process. 

Vicuna is an open-source 32-bit integer vector coprocessor written in SystemVerilog that implements version 1.0 of the RISC-V "V" Vector extension specification .