Abstract
This paper investigates the performance enhancement of elliptic curve cryptoprocessors at different implementation levels. Different implementations are proposed and analysed, and the cryptoprocessors' performance is measured at the scalar multiplication and field arithmetic levels. The proposed cryptoprocessors are coded in VHDL and implemented on a FPGA platform. The experimental results extracted from the different proposed implementations show that cryptoprocessors perform better at the field arithmetic level when a maximum of four parallel cryptoprocessors are used. However, when more than four parallel cryptoprocessors are used, they perform better at the scalar multiplication level.