The performance of elliptic curve based public key cryptosystems is mainly appointed by the efficiency of the underlying finite
field arithmetic. This work describes two generic and scalable architectures of finite field coprocessors, which are implemented
within the latest family of Field Programmable System Level Integrated Circuits FPSLIC from Atmel, Inc. The HW architectures
are adapted from Karatsuba’s divide and conquer algorithm and allow for a reasonable speedup of the top-level elliptic curve
algorithms. The VHDL hardware models are automatically generated based on an eligible operand size, which permits the optimal
utilization of a particular FPSLIC device.
Keywords Elliptic Curve cryptography -
$
\mathbb{G}\mathbb{F}\left( {2^n } \right)
$
\mathbb{G}\mathbb{F}\left( {2^n } \right)
arithmetic - Karatsuba multiplication - VHDL model generator - coprocessor synthesis - FPGA hardware acceleration - Atmel FPSLIC platform