Elliptic curve (EC) cryptosystems have become more attractive due to their small key sizes and varieties of choices of the curves available. However, it is not efficient to implement them with a general-purpose microprocessor because of word size mismatch, less parallel computation, no hardware supported wire permutation and algorithm/architecture mismatch. The solution to this problem is to build a coprocessor. This coprocessor can be optimized for the algorithm of a particular application to enhance performance. Thus, the total hardware utilization can be kept at a very high rate and the computation is speeded up. A compact fast elliptic curve crypto coprocessor with variable key size is introduced, which utilizes the internal SRAM/registers in an FPGA. The generic hardware architecture for the coprocessor is implemented with a parameterized (in term of key size) VHDL description and is synthesized/mapped to a Xilinx FPGA. The algorithms adopted and the architecture developed are suitable for massively parallel computation. The experimental results show that the design can achieve a high utilization of CLBs for the Xilinx 4000 series.

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