A Microcoded Elliptic Curve Processor for GF(2m) Using FPGA Technology

The implementation of a microcoded elliptic curve processor for GF(2^m) using FPGA technology is described. It is a scalable architecture in terms of area and speed that exploits the abilities of reconfigurable hardware to deliver optimized circuitry for different elliptic curves and finite fields. And it simply consists of only one arithmetic unit and one control unit, which is microcoded, facilitating rapid development and functional extension: for example, new applications could be supported simply by inserting more microcodes. The design was successfully tested on a Xilinx Virtex2 XC2V1000-256 device and could perform elliptic curve scalar multiplications with arbitrary points in 0.167 msec in the field GF(2¹⁹³).