  RSA(Rivest, Shamir and Adleman)is being used as a public key exchange and key
agreement tool for many years. Due to large numbers involved in RSA, there is
need for more efficient methods in implementation for public key cryptosystems.
Elliptic Curve Cryptography(ECC) is based on elliptic curves defined over a
finite field. Elliptic curve cryptosystems(ECC) were discovered by Victor
Miller and Neal Koblitz in 1985.This paper comprises of five sections. Section
I is introduction to ECC and its components. Section II describes advantages of
ECC schemes and its comparison with RSA. Section III is about some of the
applications of ECC. Section IV gives some embedded implementations of ECC.
Section V contains ECC implementation on fixed point Digital Signal
Processor(TMS320VC5416). ECC was implemented using general purpose
microcontrollers and Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) before this work.
DSP is more powerful than microcontrollers and much economical than FPGA. So
this implementation can be efficiently utilized in low-power applications.
