Fast elliptic curve cryptographic processor architecture based on three parallel GF(2/sup k/) bit level pipelined digit serial multipliers

Unusual processor architecture for elliptic curve encryption is proposed in this paper. The architecture exploits projective coordinates (x=X/Z, y=Y/Z) to convert GF(2/sup k/) division needed in elliptic point operations into several multiplication steps. The processor has three GF(2/sup k/) multipliers implemented using bit-level pipelined digit serial computation. It is shown that this results in a faster operation than using fully parallel multipliers with the added advantage of requiring less area. The proposed architecture is a serious contender for implementing data security systems based on elliptic curve cryptography.