This document summarizes an academic paper presented at the International Conference on Emerging Trends in Engineering and Management in 2014. The paper proposes a design and implementation of an elliptic curve scalar multiplier on a field programmable gate array (FPGA) using the Karatsuba algorithm. It aims to reduce hardware complexity by using a polynomial basis representation of finite fields and projective coordinate representation of elliptic curves. Key mathematical concepts like finite fields, point addition, and point doubling that are important to elliptic curve cryptography are also discussed at a high level.