Small Footprint Implementations of Scalable ECC Point Multiplication on FPGA

In this work, two new low area designs on FPGA for a scalable elliptic curve point multiplication are presented. The first design is a pure software implementation on a compact 8-bit embedded microcontroller, the PicoBlaze from Xilinx. The second is a novel hardware architecture for a compact ECC processor. Both designs are scalable across the curves m=113,131,163,193 recommended by SECG and consume respectively only (23%) and (61%) of the available resources on the smallest and lowest cost Spartan-III XC3S50 device. The proposed designs are believed to be the first smallest reported designs to date that support scalability with low area for a suite of curves recommended by an ECC standard.