Power-time flexible architecture for GF(2^k) elliptic curve cryptosystem computation

New elliptic curve cryptographic processor architecture is presented that result in considerable reduction in power consumption as well as giving a range of trade-off between speed and power consumption. This is achieved by exploiting the inherent parallelism that exist in elliptic curve point addition and doubling. Further trade-off is achieved by using digit serial-parallel multipliers instead of the serial-serial multipliers used in conventional architectures. In effect, the new architecture exploits parallelism at the algorithm level as well as at the arithmetic element level. This parallelism can be exploited either to increase the speed of operation or to reduce power consumption by reducing the frequency of operation and hence the supply voltage.