Abstract  Modular multiplication is a fundamental operation in numerous public-key cryptosystems including the RSA method. Increasing popularity of internet e-commerce and other security applications translate into a demand for a scalable performance hardware design framework. Previous scalable hardware methodologies either were not systolic and thus involved performance-degrading, full-word-length broadcasts or were not scalable beyond linear array size. In this paper, these limitations are overcome with the introduction of three classes of scalable-performance modular multiplication architectures based on systolic arrays. Very high clock rates are feasible, since the cells composing the architectures are of bit-level complexity. Architectural methods based on both binary and high-radix modular multiplication are derived. All techniques are constructed to allow additional flexibility for the impact of interconnect delay within the design environment.